Resistance Is Futile
by Bullseye Benny
Summary: The DS-Niners get mixed up with a parallel universe and some Borg...ah, just read it!
1. Prologue

Colonel Kira Nerys hurled herself down the corridor with a newfound urgency. If her internal clock was correct, Borg drones had been chasing her for nearly an hour as she had pushed, shoved, scraped and crawled her way through the darkened corridors of the space station _Deep Space Nine_. It was starting to show, too; sweat soaked her face and trickled down the front of her crimson uniform. She felt uncomfortable without her small, bronze-coloured communicator badge, but she had been forced to rid herself of it when Captain Sisko had announced that the Borg were using its comm signature to trace her. Kira rounded a corner, and winced as a crash echoed behind her. _Borg disruptors,_ she grimaced mentally. If they were that close, it would almost be too late…and it nearly was, as a pair of drones shimmered into existence a few metres up the corridor. Almost without thinking, she dodged to the left, ducking around the Borg as they materialised. _Almost there, Nerys. Almost there._

Finally, she saw her target up ahead: an airlock, shaped like a cog and fashioned of an alloy the colour of dried blood. It rolled back into the wall with a protracted hissing noise, then the upper body of Lieutenant Commander Worf appeared, phaser in hand. "Hurry, Colonel!" he called to her. Kira's legs were powered by adrenaline as they thrust her up and over the lip of their airlock. She was lucky Worf was there to catch her, for she almost tripped and cracked her head on the second heavy doorway; as it was, the Klingon gave her one burly hand for support, then slapped the Cardassian-designed control panel. The airlock closed again, erecting a more solid barrier between them and the Borg. Kira fumbled with her belt, then withdrew her Bajoran hand phaser and fired at the controls for the door, making sure they were thoroughly melted. "It should hold them off for a few more seconds," she murmured by way of explanation. Worf nodded and ushered her through to the cockpit of the small Starfleet vessel that waited.

"How many runabouts have taken off?" Kira asked as she clambered through the hatch.

Worf's expression did not change. "The _Orinoco_ escaped, but the _Mekong_ was shot down. The _Rubicon_ is under Commander Dax's control."

Kira bobbed her head once, and then crossed the runabout's small cabin to the tactical console, pausing only to greet Lieutenant Commander Jadzia Dax at the helm. The Klingon held the hatch open as citizens and crew of DS-Nine huddled their way into the back rooms. As Nerys dropped into the seat, all she wanted to do was relax. But she couldn't. Not now. She had to be ready and alert until they were safely away from the station.

"How many other senior officers made it?" she asked the Trill seated at the helm.

"Benjamin was caught down in the Last Stand," Dax said, although her voice was without feeling and tears were glazing her eyes. The Last Stand had been a group of almost fifty officers, armed with any form of energy weapon and led by Captain Sisko, that had gathered in the Lower Core to try and stop as many drones as possible. As far as anyone knew, they hadn't managed to achieve any modicum of victory. "And Miles was on the _Mekong_ when it was captured by the Borg ship."

There was a silence in the cockpit that weighed heavily on the three officers. It was clear that Miles O'Brien, formerly Chief Operations Officer of the space station, had now been assimilated into the Borg Collective, physically and mentally violated until the greater whole had absorbed his knowledge and experience. It was enough to make most people sick with worry, but Kira, Worf and Dax had to save as many lives as possible. They could no longer dwell on the loss of O'Brien. They had to escape.

A muted humming noise broke the quiet as Dax powered up the impulse drive and lifted off. Out the windows, they could see the curve of _Deep Space Nine_'s docking ring arching below them, and beyond that, the pewter-lead vessel of the Borg. It was a massive ship, almost thirty cubic kilometres in volume. As the_ Rubicon _started to turn away, a green ray of light lashed out from the cube ship and struck the runabout.

"They're trying to lock on," Kira reported from the tactical console. "Remodulating shields now."

"Laying a course for the Denorios Belt," Dax chorused. "We should be able to lose them in there, if we're lucky. ETA in three minutes. Engaging."

The _Rubicon _lurched forward as the Borg tractor beam took hold for a second, then was blocked by the new shield frequency. Dax poured as much as she could into the impulse engines and veered around the cube in an attempt to get out of weapons range. It was all Kira could do not to hold onto the console for dear life as their course twisted and turned. All the while, Dax's face was a mask of cold determination — the resemblance to the emotionless countenances of the Borg was frightening. To distract herself, Kira fired off a microtorpedo and a few phaser bursts to distract their opponent's sensors. Her own scans were alive with tiny blips from the station's escape pods: they looked like tiny islands in a sea of obsidian. One by one, the Borg ship was scooping them up and reeling them in for assimilation. If Kira had been completely heartless, she would destroy them were they floated to save those poor individuals onboard…but she had to focus on keeping the runabout safe.

Rapid deceleration shook the ship, and everyone looked up and around to see why. One glance at her screens, and Kira knew instantly. A Borg weapon had drained their shields long enough to establish a tractor beam. They were trapped, with nowhere to run. 

It's too late. But, then, it's always been too late, hasn't it? You've only been avoiding the inevitable. And now, they've caught up to you.

_Prepare to be assimilated._

"Dax," she said tonelessly. "They've got us."

"Can you break the tractor beam?"

"I can try, but they've busted through our shields. Hang on…remodulations had no effect. Firing phasers…no effect. Dammit! They've adapted to our weapons."

"Try retuning the phasers," Worf rumbled.

"I've tried. We can't break off."

There was a long moment when the rattling of the superstructure was the only sound in the cabin. Then, Dax sighed with a sad resolve and turned in her chair. "Computer, prepare for autodestruct."

"_Ready,_" replied the pleasant voice of the computer.

The Trill tapped her controls for a second, then slid her fingers up the console. "I'm going to try for a warp burst to break us free. It's our only hope. Worf, try to strengthen the structural integrity as much as you can."

"Acknowledged."

"Three…two…one…engage!"

White light poured in the windows, and the stars began to blur. The runabout screamed in protest. Dax's voice struggled to rise above the engines: "Warp point-seven! Point-eight!" It faded off for a moment, and Kira fired off a few more phaser shots in a vain attempt at destroying the Borg's tractor emitter. It actually did better than she expected, for the beams managed to scatter the lock enough for the overpowered warp drive to launch them free. The engines ceased their noise, and they catapulted towards the Denorios belt. "You did it!" Kira shouted.

Dax grinned for a moment, then looked down at her screens and the smile faded. "Worf, is it just me, or are you picking up heightened temporal emissions?"

Worf checked the operations panel in front of him and growled. "Yes. It looks like the Borg are trying to fire on us with some kind of new weapon. A sphere has broken off from the cube and is pursuing, warp four."

"Punch us up to warp five," Kira murmured.

"No can do, Colonel. They're too quick for us," Dax replied. "Thirty seconds to the Denorios Belt. I'll try to evade as much as I can, but — "

Once again, it was too late for the poor crew of the ill-fated _Rubicon_. A blast of flickering green light hit the runabout, and suddenly they were tumbling off course. The last thing any of them heard was Worf's booming timbre saying, "Tachyon eddy ahead! Brace for impact!" before a roaring explosion overtook them. There was a strange sucking sound, like water going down an old-fashioned plughole, and then silence.

*                         *                         *


	2. Chapter 1

Like a pneumatic drill shattering a pane of glass, Captain Benjamin Sisko came awake to the sound of the station's intercom beeping loudly in his quarters. "_Dax to Sisko_," was the phrase that followed it. He ran his hands over his bald skull and sighed heavily. "Go ahead, old man." It was morning, technically, but way too early for Sisko. If this was a minor glitch in the complaining child of _Deep Space Nine_'s computer core, he vowed that heads would roll. But it was Jadzia Dax, his friend and close companion for almost seven years; she wouldn't be waking him up for anything insignificant.

"_Sensors are detecting a temporal fluctuation in the Denorios Belt. Its severity has increased by the hour. Should we investigate further?_"

Sisko sat up and started the long journey to getting out of bed. He chastised himself for this every morning: there was a war going on between the Federation and the Dominion. He had to be ready and alert. But as far as he was aware, Dominion sciences didn't stretch to include quantum mechanics, so he dismissed an attack for the moment. "Have you launched a probe?"

"_Already done. It's sending back some strange readings, but the data stream isn't cohesive; I'd need to be closer to get uninterrupted scans through. Are the runabouts still down for their maintenance cycle?_"

He could hear the question behind the question in her voice already. "Yes," he murmured thoughtfully, then pushed himself to a standing position and started rummaging for his uniform. "Start preparing the _Defiant_, then. Launch in ten minutes."

A laugh echoed down the comm link. "_I'm way ahead of you: the _Defiant_'s already in pre-flight checks. I'll see you in ten._" She closed the channel, and Sisko felt a grin spread across his face as he pulled his Starfleet uniform on. Technically, Dax had the authorisation to fire up their resident starship, since she was the acting commander at the time, but if he wanted, Sisko could have filed it as a breach of protocol. Nonetheless, she was right. He suddenly felt very predictable while he walked to the replicator and ordered a quick breakfast. Now was the time to have his morning cup of coffee, seeing as the _Defiant_'s bridge replicator could only synthesise hot or cold water. He ate as much as he could in the remaining few minutes, then placed the remains back in the slot and tapped the reclamation button. 

"Sisko to Ops. Lock onto my signal and beam me to the _Defiant_'s bridge."

"_Aye, sir,_" came the reply, and Sisko faded out in a column of bright golden light.

Lieutenant Commander Jadzia Dax, Trill science officer extraordinaire, took a last look at the readouts she had obtained from the probe's data stream. It was unlike anything she had ever seen…a substantial comment, seeing as the Dax symbiont had been alive for six generations. A frown creased her normally smiling lips as the information scrolled across the screen in front of her. Even though she didn't know exactly what the anomaly was or did, she already had a bad feeling about it. 

The humming sound of the station's Cardassian transporter shook her clear of her premonitions, and Captain Sisko materialised behind her. She could tell it was him without looking around, judging by instinct and the heavy noise as he fell into the _Defiant_'s command chair. "Dax," he ordered. "Get docking clearance from Ops, then plot a course for the anomaly. Prepare for departure, one-half impulse."

"Aye, sir," she replied, and suddenly she was professional and business-like once more. Beneath her fingertips, the compact vessel detached from its berth and swung around towards open space. Dax slowly got them clear of the station, then kicked them into warp five on a course for the Denorios Belt.

Colonel Kira, seated at Tactical II, swung around in her chair. "Captain, we have a message from O'Brien. He says it's urgent," she said.

Sisko nodded at her. Miles O'Brien was temporarily in charge of _Deep Space Nine_ whilst the rest of the senior crew were investigating the temporal anomaly. Kira tapped a button, and the faintly Irish brogue of the Chief of Operations officer filled the small bridge. "_Captain, we've just lost probe telemetry._"

"Lost it? You mean the probe was destroyed?" Sisko inquired.

"_I'm not sure — one minute, we had a signal, and the next…boom! It was gone. Our scans aren't detecting the probe either. Orders?_"

Sisko looked from Dax to Kira, hoping for a suggestion. In the end, Dax shrugged and said, "Chief, we're almost there. Transfer the last readings to us, and we'll take it from here."

"_Acknowledged. DS-Nine out_."

The captain eased a crick out of his neck. "Any further readings, Dax?" he asked slowly. She knew that tone of voice, from the days when she used to be a he, namely Curzon Dax. It was the voice that tried to sound nonchalant and in control, but to an experienced listener, betrayed a depth of worry and anxiety that was almost unimaginable in a man like Sisko. She shook her head in the negative and turned back to the helm, watching the stars streak by on the viewscreen. "Once we're there, I can use our own sensors to adequately scan the anomaly. Hopefully, I can get a more conclusive reading," she replied, trying to soothe his unease. She got the feeling that it wasn't working too well, so she settled back into her chair and waited the last few minutes until she decelerated back into normal space.

That was, of course, assuming that one could call the Denorios Belt normal. It was a combination of an unusual plasma field and an asteroid belt all rolled into one, and it had more than its fair share of unusual scientific properties. The Federation's science division had long been fascinated by the Belt, and Dax's in-depth studies into it had become a considerable merit in her career. She felt that if a bizarre phenomenon was going to take place within the vicinity of the station, it would be somewhere near the Denorios Belt. Its inky-blue plasma clouds now filled the viewscreen, like a mist left by a giant octopus. 

"Scanning for temporal emissions now," she reported.

Worf, who had remained quiet at Tactical I, swivelled and stared into the screen. "Captain, the _Enterprise_ once used an inverse tachyon pulse to scan an anti-time anomaly. Could we possibly employ a similar method here?"

"Maybe," came Dax's response. "But as far as we can tell, this irregularity doesn't conform to anti-time parameters. It may give us something useful if we pipe it through the temporal spectrometer, though."

"Do it," murmured Sisko.

There was a short pause, then a bleeping noise from the helm. "I've found it," said Jadzia excitedly. "Co-ordinates one-four-seven mark four-three. Size…eight kilometres across and expanding. One moment…no sign of the probe."

She could almost hear Sisko frown. "Any debris or computer buoys?" he asked.

"Not that I can find. It looks like it just vanished." She winced a little when she caught a glower from her commanding officer. "Of course, the chroniton emissions could be masking the probe's engine signature. Give me a few minutes, and I should be able to locate something."

"Captain," Worf murmured again. "According to my preliminary readings, the anomaly is expanding exponentially. We do not have time to search for one missing probe."

"I have to agree with you, Commander," Sisko replied, one hand absent-mindedly stroking his beard. "Old man, I want you to focus on determining the composition of the anomaly. How long will it take you to get this tachyon scan operational?"

She shrugged a little. "About twenty minutes, if Engineering can spare two crewmen."

Half an hour later, the results of Dax's first tachyon sweep of the anomaly scrolled onto the viewscreen. Most of the senior staff did not pretend to understand some of the more complicated scientific terminology, but Jadzia interpreted where she could. "What we're looking at is some kind of…fountain of temporal energy, comprised mainly of chronitons. There's a lot of strange particle emanations in there that I can't pin down: it looks like a new kind of energy to me."

"Fountain?" Kira asked quizzically.

The Trill frowned at her inability to locate a more correct term. "I don't know what else to call it. But whatever it is, it's growing at an oscillating rate. Estimations show that it'll be within five hundred kilometres of the station within the next two weeks sometime. We don't know what it's going to do to DS-Nine itself."

"What about a static warp shell?" said Worf. "It could curb the instability and possibly collapse the rift."

She shook her head. "As I said earlier, this isn't an anti-time phenomenon. But there has only been one use of the static warp shell to perform such a task. Who knows? Maybe that is the way to get rid of it." She sighed helplessly. "As it is, we don't know. All we can do is conduct more scans, maybe launch another probe."

A high-pitched chirp from Worf's console turned his head and sent his muscular fingers flying across the controls. "Captain!" he growled. "I'm picking up a Starfleet transponder signal — it's the _Rubicon_!"

"The _Rubicon_?" Kira echoed. "It's in for maintenance today. I'm sure of it."

"Confirmed," said Dax from the helm. Sisko merely nodded quietly. Jadzia added, "But it's on a different subspace band to the _Rubicon_'s usual frequency. That's odd…I'm getting some strange energy fluctuations."


	3. Chapter 2

The temporal rift blotted out the stars like a huge puddle of ink, roiling and swirling in the manner of a giant whirlpool of molten lava. It was a sparkling green colour, mingled with long tendrils of hot white energy. It was to this panorama that Kira woke up, inside the dark cabin. She glanced out the windows, softly whispered a Bajoran curse, then hauled herself up to a sitting position: she didn't know what had happened in the interim, but something had thrown her clear of her chair and halfway across the runabout cabin before stopping against the transporter console. Her body hurt all over, and her mind was fuzzy. _Where the hell am I? Is Dax awake? What about our passengers?_ These questions were too much for her brain to process for now. She decided to sit up against the console's support stand and rest for a moment. No limbs or ribs seemed broken, but it was better to be safe now than to push herself and be sorry for it later.

A piece of bulkhead plating fell from it's precarious hanging position and crashed to the ground. After the insulation had settled, a low groan issued from somewhere around Kira's feet. She realised that what she thought was a collapsed piece of ceiling was actually the bent form of Jadzia Dax, covered in shredded wire insulation and sprawled on the floor. All thoughts of recuperating forgotten, she leaned forward and lifted the Trill's head as Jadzia's eyes flickered open. "Kira?" she mumbled. 

"I'm here. Don't try to move. You look hurt." The Bajoran scooted over to the helm, reached underneath the console, and withdrew an emergency medical kit. By the time she had returned to her friend, Dax was sitting against a chair and running insulation out of her hair. Kira pulled a tiny medical scanner from the kit and made a quick pass with it. "Nothing too bad," she muttered to herself. "You need rest, though."

Dax grinned through the dust on her face. "Since when were you the doctor around here?"

Kira tried to return the smile, but faltered a little. "Well, the Resistance taught me a thing or two about emergency medicine. And, after Julian was assimilated…" she paused, finding a lump in her throat. Angrily, she swallowed it back. "Someone had to take care of our war veterans, didn't they?"

"Do you know what happened?"

"In a word? No," Nerys sighed. "There was an explosion, then I woke up over there."

"The Borg ship fired some kind of torpedo at us…" Dax recalled. "We hit a tachyon eddy. Worf shouted something, and then I blanked out."

Slowly, Kira wobbled to her feet and sat down in the science chair. Her aching fingers tapped the board a few times, but nothing happened. She glanced over at the helm to find it completely off-line. "It looks like the computer froze up on us," she commented. "That, or we've got connection problems. Sensor readings are all messed up." An urge to smash the console came over her, and she forced it down in case they managed to make sufficient repairs. "Computer," she said, in the foolish hope that the voice interface was somehow still working. She wasn't disappointed when she was greeted with silence. It was then that she heard a growl. _Worf's awake…_she thought, as she leaned forward and helped her Klingon friend upright. 

He squinted, then thrust a finger forward and exclaimed, "Look! A ship!"

Both Kira and Dax turned and looked out the viewport. At first, all they could see was the slow churning of the whatever they were in, drifting past the transparent aluminium window in a dreamy, almost hypnotic manner. Was Worf hallucinating? He wouldn't get their hopes up like that. But then they saw it: a vessel, small and compact, and as a vague gap in the whatever appeared, it almost looked like a Starfleet design. Suddenly, it clicked into place and Dax gasped a little. "What's the _Defiant_ doing here? I thought it was on a strike mission in the Gamma Quadrant."

"It was," murmured Worf. "Perhaps we have been adrift for several days."

"I doubt it," Dax replied. "But I suppose it's possible."

Kira frowned and stood up. "Something about this isn't right. Worf, can you hail them?"

The Klingon tapped a control. "Negative. All communications are dead. Perhaps we are within comm badge range." He pressed the symbol on his chest. "This is Lieutenant Commander Worf, calling the U.S.S. _Defiant. _I repeat, _Defiant_, this is Commander Worf, onboard the Allied runabout _Rubicon_. Can you hear me?"

His only answer was a harsh squeal of static, so he quickly disabled the channel and frowned. Finally, he rolled over and popped a floor panel open, digging into the circuitry beneath their feet. "I will attempt to restore basic computer functions. Dax, check on the civilians and our other passengers in the back."

The Trill nodded and shakily walked through to the rear sections. Kira hoped that they were okay, after their little jaunt through the whatever. Suddenly, consoles and screens flickered and reset, and Worf leaned back with a triumphant smile on his face. Kira nodded gratefully. "Let's get to work. Kira to Dax. How are we doing back there?"

"_Not too badly, Nerys, but we have a lot of injuries. Recommend we contact the _Defiant_ as soon as possible. A couple of engineers have looked our impulse drive over, and it's no good: the tachyon eddy must have overloaded it._"

"Are the transporters functional?" Worf said, looking over at the two pads on the floor. "Perhaps we can beam over to the _Defiant_."

Kira, who had reconfigured her screen to display a simplified damage report, shook her head. "The buffers aren't in good shape. We might be able to get inanimate objects through the matter stream, but I doubt organic material would survive. Besides," she paused, and brought up a preliminary scan. Most of the sensors were down, so she had to rely on what she could patch together. "the temporal distortions are interfering with our scopes. It could be a while before we drift close enough to even get a reading on the ship, let alone a transporter lock."

The deck plates beneath her feet vibrated, and Worf swiftly rose to his feet. "There must be something we can do!" he snarled in true Klingon fashion.

"There is nothing," she replied, with what she hoped was sympathy. "The shields are down, weapons are off-line, communications and transporters are all fried. I don't know about the warp engines, but we can't even fire thrusters, and even if we could, the hull would shatter under the stress." She felt like snarling a little too. Sometimes, she wished she had a bit of Klingon DNA in her, just to excuse her fiery temper. "It's like sitting inside a hollow egg shell, waiting for someone to crush it with their foot."

Suddenly, a shrill alarm broke her train of thought, and her eyes were yanked to the damage control screen. The tiny schematic of the runabout was now replaced by a flashing red diagram of the ship's spine and nacelle section: Kira felt a fist of panic squeeze her heart mercilessly, and she prayed to the Prophets and all the Orbs that this was just a random system error and it _wasn't_ going to say what she hoped that it wouldn't…and then the countdown timer appeared, and she vaulted herself out of the seat, instantly snapping herself into what she called 'command mode'. _Why now? We survived all this temporal whatever, and now we die. Damn. Damndamndamndamndamn._

"What is it?" Worf murmured.

"Start locking everything down. Kira to Dax!"

"_What's wrong?_"

"Warp core breach in five minutes. I can't stop it from here."

As if mimicking her, the pleasant feminine voice of the computer rang throughout the doomed runabout. "_Warning. Damage to warp core. Containment failure in five minutes._"

"Can anyone eject the core?"

"_I'm not sure. I can check._"

Worf shook his head as he tapped controls. "I've shut down some of the non-essentials, but the core isn't responding to software commands."

"Dax, we haven't got time. I'm dumping computer data into the backup and separating the passenger section. Come back up to the cockpit beforehand."

"_Acknowledged._"

Thanks to the design principles of the runabout, it could separate in case of a situation like a warp core breach. As Kira worked frantically at her station, Dax was herding their passengers into the rear section of the ship — they were going to eject it from the majority of the runabout to avoid killing them in the explosion. The Trill skittered through the doorway and fell into a chair. "The aft should be sealed up by now. I pumped as much power and life support as I could in there, but after we cut them loose, it'll be up to the emergency systems to keep them alive," Dax said, panting a little. Kira nodded emotionlessly and tried to divert the EPS conduit flow away from the core. She would feel remorse if any of their passengers died, but she could do nothing about it at the moment. War did terrible things to one's soul: it was slowly hardened and frozen, until feelings and self became secondary to reaction time and the all-important name, rank and serial number.

"Computer, detach aft section. Authorisation Kira four-nine-lambda-seven."

For once, her prayer was answered, and the computer's voice interface struggled to life, processing her speech a little slower than usual. "_Authorisation accepted. Initialising separation sequence._"

The runabout quaked a little as the clamps retracted, then bucked. "_Separation complete. Aft section detached,_" said the computer. Then, on a more dire note, "_Warning. Damage to warp core. Containment failure in three minutes._"

No-one could access the warp core directly: it was built into the spine of the ship. However, there were maintenance points that were accessible from different sections, and Worf stood up and headed for one of these as Kira bit her lip. "Software instructions aren't getting through. Perhaps we can reroute somewhere."

"Worf, this is Dax," said the Trill, working as fast as she could. "Try disconnecting the core from the plasma conduits. There should be a control panel you can use."

A pause. "_Negative. The panel is not responding to commands. I am attempting to initiate a core ejection from here._"

"I'll do it. I know the system better. Get back in here and help Colonel Kira," Dax replied, then got up and ran to the now-aft section. Worf returned a moment later. 

"_Dax here,_" the intercom said. "_I've rewired some of the isolinear connections to the engines. Try it now._"

"Working," said Kira. "Dammit! The signal's getting through, but the ejection hardware is jammed." She closed her eyes and silently cursed the runabout technician who overlooked the mechanics that controlled the warp core ejector sequence. A small, logical part of her insisted that the foul-up probably occurred whilst they were in combat with the Borg, and so she couldn't blame anyone except the runabout itself. Nonetheless, it felt better that way.

"_Acknowledged,_" said Dax calmly. How could she be so damn calm in a situation where they only had…

"_Warning. Damage to warp core. Containment failure in one minute._"

…one minute to live? Kira envied her friend's patience in times like this.

"_Hang on…I think I've got it. Manual ejection on-line and functional. Stand by for…_"

"I can't!" shouted Kira. "We haven't got time to stand by! Can you dump the core?"

Silence came over the link for a few seconds, and then the Trill replied helplessly, "_Stand by._"

"_Warning. Damage to warp core. Containment failure in forty-five seconds._"

In the rear section, Dax tugged a heavy level downwards, and smiled a little as the screens in front of her reported success. She had physically locked down the magnetic constrictors, but had been forced to eject the core too. Thirty seconds to go. Nervous fingers fumbled with the isolinear chips, but she managed to pull out the right ones and place them in different slots. Twenty-one seconds. The computer reported an error as it read the chips and recommended that she return them to their correct places: eighteen seconds left. Gas began spewing out of a microfracture on the core's reaction chamber. Dax took hold of the lever and flipped it again. Still no success. Across the other side was another switch, identical to the one she had just moved: she scrambled over and yanked it to the closed position. "Kira! Get ready!" she shouted, hoping that the intercom picked it up.

Twelve seconds.

Heavy machinery laboured somewhere behind the bulkheads, and suddenly she heard the warp core sliding towards the ejector hatch at the rear of the runabout. It was working! "_Warning. Damage to warp core. Containment failure in ten seconds. Evacuate vessel and eject core immediately,_" the computer droned. Dax gasped as she realised that they would be vaporised in the explosion at this rate: they needed shields if they were going to survive, and as far as she knew, the shields were dead. All that work, for nothing. Hot tears filled her eyes and she slumped to the floor, angry at the injustice of her death. It had all been so _pointless._ Her nerves tingled in anticipation of the boiling antimatter that would soon consume her. _I'm coming, Benjamin._ "Not like this," she sobbed, fighting the thickness of her throat. "This isn't right."

_It's not right…_

_It's not right…_

_It's not right…_

The warp core exploded.


	4. Chapter 3

Lieutenant Commander Dax snapped her head around when she saw the alarms light up along her controls. "They've dumped their warp core. Breach in five seconds," she reported in clipped, precise tones.

Sisko thumbed the intercom toggle and clamped his hands to the command chair. "All hands, brace for impact. Dax, emergency transport…!" But by the time he had spat the last part of his sentence out, there was no more time left. The tiny glowing rod of the core flashed once, then lit up in a fiery explosion of matter and antimatter, engulfing the _Rubicon_ and buffeting their own ship with a shell of burning plasma. To Dax's credit, she managed to pirouette the _Defiant_ around to minimise their profile. The shields glowed fiercely as they absorbed shock wave upon shock wave. Finally, though, the ship righted itself, and they were left staring into the anomaly, freshly disturbed by the violent warp core breach. 

"Dax," Sisko ordered. "Run a scan for the runabout. Did they survive the explosion?"

"Checking. Wait…negative. Most of it was destroyed, but it looks like the cockpit section is still intact. I'm activating a tractor beam," said the science officer. 

The captain narrowed his eyes at the vortex-like anomaly on the viewscreen, but his brooding thoughts were interrupted by the triple beep of the intercom. "_Transporter room to bridge,_" said a masculine voice. Sisko rubbed his eyes tiredly.

"Bridge here," he said.

"_Sir, I…well…are Lieutenant Commanders Dax and Worf present?_"

He tilted his head slightly. "Yes."

"_What about Colonel Kira?_"

"Yes. Is there a problem?"

The unfortunate transporter operator stopped for a moment, as if considering his choice of phrasing, then threw caution to the wind and said, "_I think you'd all better get down here, captain._"

By that time, everyone had their eyes firmly fixed on the captain. Sisko arched an eyebrow, then motioned for Worf, Dax and Kira to follow him to the turbolift. As they waited for it to arrive, the colonel finally broke the quiet. "Captain, do you know anything about this?" She hated being impatient, but the transporter operator hadn't exactly made anything clear in his short conversation with the captain. It irritated her, to say the least. But Sisko just shrugged. "I know as much as you, Colonel."

They arrived seconds later, and it was only a short walk to the transporter room. Much like most of the _Defiant_, it was considered to be smaller than usual by Starfleet standards. There was one cylindrical alcove set into the wall that sheltered the transporter pads. Three humanoids stood on those pads now, each in varying states of confusion, trying to figure out where they were. Even Worf, who was extremely difficult to surprise, let his eyes widen in shock as he recognised the three survivors of the runabout: one by one, Sisko, Worf, Dax and Kira shook their heads and tried to come to grips with what they were seeing. The uniforms were slightly different save for the comm badge, but still recognisable as Starfleet and Bajoran; the countenances fatigued; the stances the same. It was impossible, but at the same time, it was horribly, horribly real. 

"Behind me!" shouted the Worf on the transporter pad as he drew a phaser. Captain Sisko had spent a lot more time around weapons thanks to the Dominion War, and while it looked vaguely like the type-two hand phasers he was used to, it was also wildly different. The handle was longer, for one thing, and there must have been extra devices in the front, because it was bulkier. But this Worf seemed to know how to use it, as he pointed it right at Sisko's head. The captain held his hands up.

"What?" he said. "Who are you, and why did you come here?"

The second Worf snarled angrily. "You are nothing but a Borg illusion! I will destroy you before you can assimilate us!"

Now it was Dax (the one standing with Sisko, that is) who appeared disoriented. "Borg illusion? We haven't heard from the Borg in a few years. How can you think that Captain Sisko is part of the Collective?" As she said this, the other Dax stood up from her slumped position and dabbed at her wet eyes. Eyes, Sisko noticed, that were lined with stress and worry, and loss. 

"I think we have a lot of explaining to do," she said through a stuffy nose.

He nodded. "I think we do."


	5. Chapter 4

Half an hour after the bizarre incident in the transporter room, Captain Sisko found himself seated in the mess hall of the _Defiant_ with two sets of Kira, Dax and Worf. It was like seeing double, or having a constant case of déjà vu that refused to obey the laws of quantum physics. It only served to make his headache worse. He rubbed his eyes and hoped that this was all a dream, and that when he opened his eyes, he would see only one of each of his senior staff. Sisko let one eyelid creep up a little, and saw that the duplicates had stubbornly refused to go away. 

_Damn._

"Alright," he said, trying to muster some energy into the sullen stares of the two Worfs, the suspicious glances of the Kiras, and the inquisitive gazing of the Daxs. "Judging by your uniforms and comm badges, you three aren't just some kind of mistimed transporter accident. Am I right?"

A general bobbing of heads from the duplicates indicated some kind of consensus, so he continued. "So, that still doesn't explain your origins. Let me explain what we know so far. We detect a temporal anomaly in the Denorios Belt, and so we decide to investigate. However, when we get there, we find one of our runabouts floating around inside a rift: a runabout that, when I check, is still sitting in its landing pad back at _Deep Space Nine_. Before we can do anything, the runabout dumps it's warp core and is almost destroyed in the explosion. We beam the crew aboard. But when they materialise, I find three spare members of my senior crew on the transporter pad, with one claiming that I am a Borg illusion."

The Worf-replicate looked down at his boots. "My apologies, Captain. I…we all thought you to be dead. Or worse."

"Worse?" he exclaimed.

Now it was the Dax-replicate's turn. She tried to look at his eyes, but for some reason, he noticed that she could not bring herself to meet his gaze. "I know it's a lot to swallow, Benj…Captain, but you have to believe us. We don't know how it worked either."

"Well," he said, trying to nod sympathetically. "why don't you tell me your side of the story? Perhaps we can piece some of this together."

"Okay. _Deep Space Nine_ was under attack by a Borg ship. They managed to assimilate the Lower Core, so we had to evacuate everyone we could, and I had to fly the _Rubicon_. As we were fleeing, a sphere broke off and pursued us. They fired some kind of weapon at us. The ship was knocked off course, into a tachyon eddy…and then we were in this rift. And the _Defiant_ was there, too, which was strange, seeing as we thought it was in a different part of the galaxy. Anyway, we jettisoned the passenger section before our warp core went critical, but the next thing we knew, we were standing in the transporter room," said the Dax-replicate. She still looked a little stressed, but better than she had before.

Sisko tried to fight down the revulsion and fear that had arisen in his heart when she had mentioned the Borg. The last time he had encountered them, they had caused the death of his wife Jennifer, as well as the destruction of the U.S.S. _Saratoga_, the ship he had been serving on. That had been almost ten years ago — time had not dulled the memories of the pewter-coloured cube ship roaring through Wolf 359, destroying Federation ships left and right. He tried to distract himself. "We haven't seen the Borg for almost three years," he murmured. "and they've never come to DS-Nine."

Jadzia (Sisko's Jadzia, that is) had been eagerly tapping the story into a padd. "It's possible that these three could be versions of us from a future point in the timeline. What was the exact date when the station was attacked?"

"Stardate 53211.3," said the Kira-replicate in a militaristic fashion. "2376."

"Computer, what is today's date, in Federation reckoning?" Dax asked the computer.

"_Stardate 53212.1,_" the computer replied.

"Well, that clinches it," Dax said to herself. "You aren't future versions of us. Unless your method of measuring time is somehow different to ours. What does the symbol of your comm badge signify?"

The Kira-replicate touched the badge absently. "It's the emblem of the Alliance. Well, technically, it's called the Triumvirate, but usually we call ourselves the Alliance or the Allies. It's a conglomeration of the Federation and the empires of the Klingons and Romulans." She caught the curious looks from her counterparts and Captain Sisko, then smiled and dipped her head. "You have no idea what's going on, do you?"

"In a word?" Sisko said. "No."

"Okay. Well, here's our history in thirty seconds. Stardate 44001.4, a Borg vessel sweeps through Federation space, wiping out a defensive fleet at Wolf 359. It continues towards the planet Earth, and enters orbit there on stardate 44002.3, ready to assimilate humanity."

Sisko interrupted at that point and said, "I follow you so far. My ship was in the battle at the Wolf system. You've quoted our own history books until this point."

The Kira-replicate frowned in response. "Then perhaps we are future versions of your crew. Anyway, Captain Picard of the _Enterprise_ had been assimilated into the Collective as Locutus, a kind of liaison between the Federation and the Borg. He led the attack, wiped out orbital protection, and began to bombard Earth. It only took a few hours for the major population centres to be overrun by drones." A kind of sympathy flooded through her eyes before she continued. "The war continued for three years before it was over."

"So you aren't future versions," mused Dax. "Just alternate versions of us."

"Alternate?" queried Sisko.

But the Dax-replicate had picked up her counterpart's line of thinking and continued. "Of course! That explains everything. The different histories, the lack of Borg threats here…your presence, Captain," she said in a lower voice. Sisko sat back a little. _Alternate universe theory. Divergent realities where history changes. My presence? Obviously, Captain Ben Sisko either never existed, or was killed, or…_

"Assimilated?" he murmured in a hoarse voice.

The Dax-replicate nodded sadly. "Most likely. You were involved in a Last Stand to clear the Borg from the Lower Core. The teams there were taken by drones."

He blinked a few times to clear his thoughts. "It looks like your universe deviated from ours on stardate 44002.3, then. In this reality, the ship was destroyed in Earth's orbit by the _Enterprise_, and Captain Picard was returned to normal. What happened to the _Enterprise_ to prevent it's destruction?"

Kira's doppelganger shook her head and picked up a pad, absent-mindedly pressing points on its screen. "As near as we can tell, the Borg destroyed the battle section and assimilated the saucer while it was split up. They used acting-Commander Shelby's tactical knowledge to thwart any last attempts to stop them. Ever since the war on Earth was lost to the Borg, we've had to reorganise our own hierarchies to cope with our losses: hence the formation of the Alliance. Starfleet amalgamated with the Klingon and Romulan fleets a few years ago, and we've been sharing technology and resources ever since." She sighed. "The Federation has only thirty percent of its space left. Forty percent of Klingon space has been overrun, and we're not sure about the Romulans. So far, Bajor has been churning out as many fighter craft as they can to supplement Alliance strength, but…well, let's say that the war isn't going too well at the moment. We've been subdividing the fleet into strike groups and defensive flotillas, and it can be effective up to a point, but the Borg's adaptation rate is faster than ours. We can only do so much."

There was a long silence as Sisko took the information in. It was like a Federation tactician's worst nightmare coming to life: an assimilated Earth, a decentralised Starfleet, and an unstoppable enemy who could refit their ships to compensate for new weaponry almost instantly. If these battle-worn duplicates couldn't stand up to the Borg, how could they, with the added pressure of the Dominion? He found that he could not find an answer.

"Do the Borg know about the temporal anomaly?" he asked quietly.

The Kira-replicate shrugged. "We don't know. If we could reconstruct our computer records from the _Rubicon_, it might give us a better picture. For now, though, we can't be sure. If they do, I can assure you that they will be coming."

The atmosphere in the mess hall suddenly became heavier. It felt a few degrees cooler, and Sisko could have sworn that the lights appeared a little darker. "Dax," he said finally. "Recover what you can from the wreckage out there. Help our friends here with their records. We need to know all we can about this parallel universe, and it's Borg inhabitants. And get me Admiral Roleman at Starfleet Command: we're going to need some help."

"_Do you understand the situation, Captain?_"

"Yes, Admiral, but I don't know why you continually refuse to — "

"_Listen, Ben. I can't just hand over a fleet of battleships. The Dominion may be on the run for now, but we don't know if the tide will turn again. Right now, the fleet's on war duties. I can't spare anything without compromising our position._"

Sisko grimaced internally and reminded himself that this was why he refused to progress to a bureaucratic desk job. "Admiral, we have to assume that the Borg will be coming for us now. The Dominion are now a secondary threat to Starfleet, compared to a Borg invasion. For all we know, a cube could have just come through the anomaly: I need extra protection here, at the station. Now."

"_Captain. I don't think you…_" she stopped, and apparently rethought her sentence. "_Alright. You can have the _Thunderchild _and the _Sarekar_. With the _Defiant_, that's three ships. There's your extra protection._"

He slammed his hands on the desk and propelled himself to a standing position, drilling the screen with a cold but furious glare. "Admiral. Do you remember stardate 44001.4? There were thirty-nine starships gathered at Wolf 359 to stop the Borg invasion. Everyone thought that this was a brilliant countermeasure. But everyone was wrong. One lone Borg ship swept through the sector and destroyed every single one of those ships. The _Kyushu._ The _Excalibur_. The _Melbourne_." He paused for emphasis. "The _Saratoga_. Can you imagine that? Thirty-nine starships. Eleven thousand lives. The station may not have a crew complement that high, Admiral, but we have hundreds of civilians here. And what about Bajor? If DS-Nine falls, they're next. Trust me, ma'am, they will not appreciate the Federation's wisdom if we are the instigators of their mass assimilation."

Roleman tried to return his anger, but was only partially acceptable. "_Captain,_" she said with an icy voice, a tone that reinforced who was subordinate to who. "_The Dominion made an advance towards Earth yesterday. They got almost an entire sector before we caught up to them. We lost four vessels and a starbase. I'm sorry about your experience on the _Saratoga_, but I think we have bigger things to think about. Our war of attrition with the Jem'Hadar is not going to be over any time soon: panicking the Federation with the threat of ultimate assimilation is not going to help matters at all. I apologise, but we have to keep the Dominion off our backs. Roleman out_."

The screen blanked abruptly, and Sisko sank back into his chair. He could appreciate the difficulty of Roleman's position, but that didn't justify her outright refusal. With more force than he intended to, he stabbed the intercom toggle with his finger. "Sisko to bridge."

"_Bridge here_," came the voice of Worf.

"Have we retrieved everything we can from the wreckage?" he asked.

"_Yes, sir. The parallel crew members are currently decrypting information from their computer core. We can return to the station, if you wish._"

"Do so, Commander. And send a communiqué to the station: tell them to keep docking pylons one and two free."

"_Acknowledged. Anything else, sir?_"

"No. Sisko out," he said, leaning back in his chair. He felt like he was beating his head against a duranium bulkhead. They would be back at the station in a few minutes, if the subtle shift in the gravity he had just felt was their overpowered warp drive kicking in, and then they would be charged with the task of preparing _Deep Space Nine_ as a bastion against the seemingly-overwhelming strength of the Borg. Not that Admiral Roleman cared. One Borg vessel was much larger than the station, and they would be extremely lucky if they could repel a lone ship with their own arsenal, let alone a fleet bent on assimilating the universe. He briefly considered appealing to outsiders for help, but set it aside almost instantly: most other sources would either be considered illegal or would be of little to no help. The deep revulsion for bureaucratic red tape rose within him again, and he resisted the urge to slam his fists on the desk again. "Sisko to Dax," he said to the empty mess hall.

"_Dax here._"

He hoped he was talking to the right Dax: they had encoded the doppelgangers' comm badges to function within their own intercom system. "Have you made any progress with the runabout's computer core?"

A sigh came down the link, and he smiled in familiarity. That was the sound she made whenever she knew something was there, but couldn't quite reach it. "_It's slow going. A lot of information we've got here is corrupted from the explosion, but it was a good thing that they locked it down and secured it before they got beamed out. We're filling in as many gaps as we can, but so far, all we've gotten are peripheral reports and minor sensor sweeps. I have a feeling it'll be a long wait before we can dig up something useful._"

"Trust me," he replied. "I know the feeling. I just got off subspace with Starfleet Command: they've refused to send us any more than two starships to repel any form of Borg incursion."

"_What?! Two starships will hardly be enough. Benjamin, you've got to convince them to call in more — _"

He jumped in before she could continue. "I have been over that point many times with them, but apparently Admiral Roleman thinks the Dominion are a much higher priority than a Borg fleet. There will be no reinforcements arriving."

Dax sighed her sigh again, and this time, Sisko was tempted to join in, too. "_In that case, we can all start practicing saying 'Resistance is futile' _". He laughed, despite the grim situation, but quickly stifled it. "In all seriousness, old man, I think we're looking at a good old two-front war."

"_The Borg on one side and the Dominion on the other. Not a good position._" But before Sisko could reply, he heard a sharp beeping in the background, followed by Dax's voice talking to someone out of the intercom's range. She sounded worried when she finally came back on. "_Looks like you should have argued with the admiral further, sir._"

"Why?" he asked, confused.

"_We've just picked up activity from the temporal rift. It could be a Borg ship. Give me a second to…damn. It's confirmed. One vessel, rectangular configuration, about the size of the _Defiant_. It's left the anomaly and is heading towards us at warp five. We can outrun it for now. Orders?_"

But Sisko was speechless: a spear of terror had been thrust through the very core of his heart. He could not move, could not speak, could not even blink his eyes for the force of the shock bouncing around inside him. The electric fingers of fright were digging deep into his mind, plucking forth memories that he thought long-buried: (_The huge cube drifting through space, firing deadly beams that cut down the starships left and right…Hranok, the Bolian tactical officer, working his controls, saying, "The Borg ship is attempting to lock onto the _Melbourne_ with it's tractor beam,"…the quaking voice of the Operations officer, trying to read off the shield stability as it plummeted towards zero…Picard's face on the viewscreen, pale and distorted with cold grey metal. One arm had been extended with a whirring prosthetic, and a red sensor scope flashed at them, studying Captain Storil and the rest of the crew. "I am Locutus of Borg." Without thought, without feeling. "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. You will disarm all your weapons, and escort us to sector zero-zero-one. If you attempt to intervene, we will destroy you."_)

"Assimilate?" he murmured to himself, caught in a bizarre limbo between memory and reality. "Like hell. Dax, bring us up to red alert. Reverse course and prepare for combat.

Dax hesitated on the other end of the line, then finally acquiesced. "_Very well. Dax out._" A moment later, the flashing crimson lights and the klaxon heralded the compliance of his commands. Sisko moved away from the chair and strode towards the bridge, not looking forward to the combat ahead of him.

*                         *                         *


	6. Chapter 5

"Coming up on Borg vessel. Intercept time: thirty seconds."

"Phasers charged, forward torpedoes ready. Photons loaded. Quantum torpedoes in reserve. I can remodulate shield frequency on command, sir."

"DS-Nine reports alert level four. They're ready to upgrade to red alert if necessary."

The veritable barrage of reports came at Sisko from all stations. He merely nodded in acknowledgement as each one was delivered, to save time and keep himself calm. According to preliminary scans, the Borg ship was not a cube, so they wouldn't be facing certain death. However, it was a parallel universe version of the Borg, and so he could not base his assumptions on his previous experience: indeed, this ship looked almost diminutive compared to his expectations. Dax throttled down to impulse and threw an image of the vessel up on the viewscreen for all to see.

It was shaped almost like a sharp-edged torpedo. Long and flat, it resembled a flying lozenge that was covered in a technological kudzu. Green light shimmered faintly from behind various bits and pieces of metal. As Dax had reported earlier, it was approximately the same size as the _Defiant_, and wouldn't have had a 'crew' of more than a hundred. Sisko hoped that this fight would be short.

"Allied Colonel Kira. Can you tell me anything about this vessel?" he asked, eyes riveted to the strange ship on the screen.

The Kira-replicate, seated at the science console, slapped her hands against the sides of her legs. She didn't seem fazed by the Borg vessel: her manner was that of one who knows the outcome of an event already, and wishes only to see it through to its obvious conclusion. "Well, sir, if I'm right, that's a Borg probe/interceptor ship. As near as we can tell, their primary purpose is to scout uncharted territory, locate and investigate possible targets for assimilation, and sometimes supplement cargo transfer or even war fleets." She shrugged.

"A Borg herald," Sisko muttered reflectively. "We can't allow this ship to return to the Collective. Dax, are you reading any subspace transmissions from the ship?"

Dax worked her controls for a moment, then shook her head. "I can't pick up any of the usual signs that they're communicating with the Collective. Perhaps they can't transmit across the anomaly." She shrugged. "If that's the case, then they're going to have to cross back through to report back to the Borg."

This conversation had brought Worf's interest to bear. He was seated at Tactical I, glancing at the readouts of their opponent every few seconds for any sign of a change. "Shall I fire weapons, sir?" he asked, with more than a little Klingon battle drive. Sisko entertained the possibility in his head, but decided that it might be risky. "No, Worf. Hold your fire. Has there been any change in Borg readings since we arrived?"

"No, sir," admitted Worf, a little sullenly.

"They haven't probed us yet: perhaps they don't think of us as a threat. In which case, I'd like to use this opportunity to learn all we can. Kira number two?" he asked, referring to the Bajoran from a parallel universe. "Do you think the Borg would object if we beamed a small party to their vessel?"

"I'm not sure, sir," she replied. "If they recognise your transporter signature, it'll be as a threat, then they'll make every effort to either drive you out or assimilate you. But we've sent teams over before without causing a fuss. It's just when we start poking and prodding that they get all riled up." She pushed away from the science console. "Permission to lead the away team, captain?"

Sisko looked up at her, and nodded. "Permission granted. Take our Worf with you, as well as your Dax. I have a feeling you might need her. Send your Worf up here to replace ours at Tactical I — I might feel safer with a Klingon on the trigger. Will you be needing any special equipment?"

"Each member of the team will need at least one weapon capable of rotating frequencies in case we get caught. A few tricorders wouldn't go astray, either. I don't suppose you've developed any form of portable cloaking technology, by any chance?"

"I wish we had, Colonel. Go to it."

"Aye, sir," she said, and disappeared down a hatch with Worf in tow. Moments later, an almost identical Worf appeared out of a turbolift and took the Tactical I console: Sisko thought for a moment that his Klingon lieutenant had shirked his duties and somehow lost the Allied Colonel Kira in the narrow hallways of the ship. But then he remembered his own orders, and settled back into the chair, staring at the Borg ship as though forcing it to give up its secrets merely by the power of his gaze. It remained obstinately quiet and still. _We're in for a long wait…_


	7. Chapter 6

The transporter glimmered for a moment, and then Colonel Kira, displaced from her own reality, was standing inside her fear.

As she had expected, the Borg vessel was currently not on what she termed, 'all-systems-go'. A few drones were pottering around, using glowing computer consoles or pressing their prosthetic arms into sockets, but the majority of them stood in their alcoves, quietly regenerating or working within the ship's computer. She glanced apprehensively at each of the drones and decided that they weren't going to launch an attack on her. "Kira to _Defiant_," she whispered, pressing her comm badge with two fingers. "Transport complete. The Borg aren't in battle mode: I think we're safe for now. Keep a lock on us at all times."

"_Acknowledged, Colonel. Don't go spoiling the party for us. Sisko out._"

She hoisted her hand phaser and looked to Worf, who was packing a long compression phaser rifle. Two very different weapons, but both effective against the monstrous cybernetic beings they hoped not to fight. "Okay. We stick together for now," she said to the Klingon, her Dax, and two security guards. "Take passives scans only, and don't shoot unless you're absolutely certain that they're after you. Let's move." Memories of reconnaissance missions and raids on Borg cubes came flooding back as four of them formed a defensive perimeter around Dax, who stood there with a tricorder. "This is fascinating," she said to herself. "We haven't taken readings like this before. The Alliance will…"

"The Alliance is on the other side of that rift, Dax," Kira snapped. Then she calmed herself. "Sorry. This whole parallel reality thing is a bit much to accept. Keep taking your readings; if we ever get home, I'm sure the Alliance will appreciate it."

And so they continued on, moving between the alcoves and avoiding the drones wherever possible. Rows of blank faces, monstrous fusions of cold metal and grey flesh. Their countenances revealed nothing, promised nothing, expected nothing. Kira imagined existence as a drone as being one big nothing. She tried not to look at their faces, instead turning her attention to the vacant halls and the eerie green and yellow lighting. It was hot in here (Thirty-nine-point-one degrees Celsius, her training reminded her), and it wasn't long before she began to sweat like an ice cube on a summer afternoon. _Strange,_ she reflected. _The drones aren't sweating._ She risked a glance the closest Borg, and gasped when she saw distinctive ridges on the bridge of the nose. It was an assimilated Bajoran, probably from one of their smaller attack ships, now transformed into what appeared to be a science drone. She felt like she should offer a prayer to the Prophets or something similar, but after all she had been pulled through, somehow the Prophets didn't seem to be cutting it anymore. She had prayed to them — oh, how she had prayed! — but the war wasn't over. The Borg hadn't miraculously retreated back to the Delta Quadrant. A fleet of magical dreadnoughts hadn't popped out of the wormhole as a blessing from the Celestial Temple. It was disheartening, to say the least, and she often wondered how Kai Winn and the rest of her followers could remain true to the faith in such times as these.

"Kira?" asked Dax, and Nerys had to launch herself out of the ocean of memories. They remained at the edge of her mind, taking a little of her alertness away. "Kira? I think I know why the Borg haven't scanned the _Defiant_ yet."

"What? Why?"

Dax peered at her tricorder screen to double-check her theory, then nodded. "It looks like they were damaged on the way through the rift. Their scopes are off-line, if my extrapolations are correct. The drones have all been focusing their repairs on sensor nodes." She shrugged. "They're blind."

"That explains the regeneration," said the colonel. "Okay. Kira to _Defiant_,"

"_What is it, Colonel?_"

"We know why the Borg are inactive. From what Dax tells me, they lost their sensors in the temporal passage. They're regenerating, but we don't know for how long."

Sisko, on the other end of the link, took a breath, then blew it out. "_Can you give me an estimate on how long you've got?_"

Kira glanced from Dax to the tricorder, and the Trill frowned a little. "Ballpark?" she said with an inquisitive look. Her Bajoran friend nodded in the affirmative, and Dax said, "An hour, maximum. We've probably got way less than that now."

"Did you hear that, sir?"

"_I did. Do what you have to do, Colonel, because I'll be beaming you out in fifteen minutes. I'm not taking any risks. If that ship gets back to its home, you can bet your pips that it'll come back with a few of it's big brothers in tow._"

But before she could say anything else, Kira was distracted by a low humming that interposed itself over the top of the usual background noises on the Borg ship. A few drones that had been standing in their alcoves lurched forward and turned their heads to study the away team. Worf and the security guards held up their weapons as the drones advanced on them. Kira felt a burst of adrenalin pump through her and she shouted, "Move!" On cue, they scattered down the corridor, followed by three Borg.

"The security grid is back on-line," Dax said unnecessarily.

"Captain!" Kira panted as she ran. "The regenerative cycle is over. They're active again. Emergency transport!"

"_We can't, Colonel. The Borg shields are back on-line, and we can't lock onto you. We're trying to focus our sensors on your position: give us something to work with!"_

"Acknowledged! Kira out!" She scrabbled around to pull her phaser from its holster and bring it to bear. She heard the methodical clanking of metal feet pounding on metal deck plates, and shivered as the image of the Bajoran drone rose unbidden from her sea of memory. _Not like that. I'll kill us all before I'll serve them. Sisko said to give their sensors something to lock onto: she was going to find that something and exploit it. The Borg interceptor was positively buzzing with energy (even though it was a little bigger than the __Defiant, it generated a lot of power), and there had to be something she could use to transmit a signal. "Dax, find me a transmitter of some kind," she called across the corridor. To her dismay, there wasn't much corridor left. Time to look for another way out._

"Searching," Dax replied.

"Open fire!" Worf shouted, and the warm air of the hallway was punctuated with phaser bolts. Two of the Borg drones fell, but the third generated a glowing body shield, and the energy blast washed over it like water off a duck's back.

"They have adapted. Remodulate weapons!" the Klingon growled. 

Meanwhile, Dax looked up from her tricorder. "Got it," she said triumphantly, then moved to a wall console. "I might be able to hotwire these controls to send out a signal. I'll need time."

"How much time?" barked Kira.

The Trill hesitated, wincing as a Borg disruptor glow crashed into the wall behind her. "Fifteen minutes at the most."

Kira glanced back at the team, and noticed that their phasers were becoming increasingly useless. The Borg would soon compensate for the alternate (alternate for her, that is) universe designs and become impervious to their fire. "That's fifteen minutes too long. We need to get out of here, and fast!" She squeezed off two shots, and flinched when her target contorted in its alcove. The thought of killing innocents always burned a hole in the core of her being, but she knew that the death of a Borg would set its individuality free. 

Dax was wandering down a corridor before the colonel had even finished speaking. Her tricorder emitted bleeping sounds of varying pitch and intensity as it located usable signal sources, then other forms of diversion. Finally, she found what she was looking for and yanked the hand phaser from her belt. "Dax to _Defiant_," she called over the increasing din of the weapons fire. "Get as close as you can to the source of this transmission, and watch out for an energy discharge. Then beam us out as fast as you can."

At that, she held her phaser up and pointed at the ceiling. There was an innocuous-looking pipe running over their heads, about as wide as she was, that was giving off some suspiciously high power levels. She made sure that her tricorder was correct in its readings, then took aim and fired. The beam splashed out against the dull surface of the pipe, but did not pierce it, as expected. Dax thumbed the frequency up to the higher settings in the electro-magnetic band and pressed the trigger again. This time, her phaser shot gashed into the conduit and there was a loud explosion that shook the interceptor. She breathed a sigh of relief as she saw a glowing green force-field appear around the hole. Her strategy had relied on the Borg's low response time: if they had not adapted to the damage, the entire corridor would have been scorched by plasma, and the away team and their pursuers would have been vaporised. The familiar tingle of the transporter took hold of her a few seconds later.


	8. Chapter 7

"The interceptor is powering weapon systems. Suggest we execute evasive manoeuvres immediately," said Lieutenant Dax at the helm. 

Sisko nodded. "Engage. Bridge to transporter room: did you get them?"

"_We got them, sir. They'll be up shortly. Transporter room out._"

He breathed a little easier. When the Borg shields had gone up, the first thought he had was that his away team was about to be assimilated into the Collective. But the Dax-replicate's plan had created a considerable energy release that had also caused a fluctuation in the shields, giving him time to beam them off. It had been a slightly foolhardy tactic, but it was not his place to debate it with her, so he decided to let it pass. "Mister Worf," he said, still watching the torpedo-shaped vessel on the screen. "Power up phasers. Open a channel to the interceptor."

If the Klingon was surprised by this order, he did not show it. "Phasers charged and ready to fire. Channel open to the Borg ship."

Sisko stood up and walked a bit closer to the screen. "Borg vessel, this is Captain Benjamin Sisko of the Federation starship _Defiant_. I respectfully request that you power down and surrender. According to our scans, your defences cannot withstand our weapons." He stopped and waited for a response. The Borg gave him none.

"Fire a warning shot. Fifty percent power, and target a non-essential system, if you can find one. Shoot when you're ready," he said grimly.

"Captain!" Worf exclaimed. "Should we not destroy them while we still can?"

"Negative. This may be our only opportunity to study them. A chance like this has not, and most certainly will not, come along every day. We have to seize it with both hands and hang on for dear life…" His reply was cut short as an emerald ray of light stabbed across the void and hit the _Defiant_'s shields. Everyone swayed, and Sisko staggered back to his chair.

"Then again…to hell with it. Open fire, full strength. But try and disable them," he added, almost as an afterthought. Soon, bright pulses of orange phaser light filled the screen, and the Borg ship shook a little under the brunt of the attack. Two shots got through before the shields suddenly grew stronger.

"Borg defences have adapted to our phasers. Remodulating frequencies…firing again," Worf said with zest. A renewed stream of energy lanced from the _Defiant_, accompanied by a muted _pew-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew_ that made the ship vibrate ever so slightly. A trail of fire-bright explosions lit up the interceptor, and it suddenly turned around and made a beeline for the anomaly. Sisko pushed himself upright again with renewed urgency. "Pursuit course! Don't let them get away. Worf, knock their engines out, now. Use photons if you have to."

A pair of glittering torpedoes streaked away and thudded into the Borg ship, adding to the blaze that already trailed along the interceptor's spine. Worf tried another phaser barrage, but the ship was accelerating and dodged the pulses. Sisko glared at the screen, silently willing the interceptor to slow down, but it had little effect. Then, all of a sudden, the leaden surface of the Borg ship ignited, and blew itself to a cloud of spiralling shrapnel and frozen gases. The captain whirled to look at the tactical officer. "Worf, what the hell just happened?"

He checked his boards. "It appears that one of our torpedoes failed to detonate, instead lodging in their hull. A drone must have tried to disarm it: the security safeguards on the warhead triggered the explosion. I apologise for not disabling them, sir."

"It's alright, Worf. Somehow, I think we're going to get plenty of chances in the future," he sighed as the doors behind him whooshed open, allowing the three senior officers from the away team onto the bridge. "The Borg were a little oversensitive, I see."

The Dax-replicate nodded as she took a vacant seat. "It's my fault, Captain. The security net was off-line when we beamed aboard, and it instantly recognised our hand weapons when it was regenerated. I should have been more careful: disguised our phasers, formulated a scattering field to mask us, something to keep us safe."

"But it was your quick thinking that saved your arms from being turned into guns," Colonel Kira pointed out. Her parallel replicate nodded in agreement as she brushed a smudge of carbon scoring from her uniform. "And you did a little damage to them in the first place. It seems that — " She stopped when she saw the lights on her screen change position. Kira bent over the console intently, shaking her head and muttering something under her breath as a coloured diagram took the place of her tactical analysis of the Borg interceptor. "Captain," she called out. "we've got more of a problem than we thought. I'm detecting a low-level impulse trail heading away from the debris field and into the anomaly's mouth. The frequency readings…they correspond with the information our alternate selves provided about the Collective."

"Your point being what, Colonel?" Sisko asked impatiently.

"Well, sir, it looks like the Borg ship launched some kind of probe just before it exploded. It survived the blast and headed through. If I've done my homework correctly, I'd say it's back with the Collective now."

Sisko blew out a breath and rested his head against his steepled fingers. "Then it's entirely possible that the Borg know exactly where and who we are. If that's any indication, we could be looking at yet another attack. Just what we needed." He swung his chair around so it faced the viewscreen again. Sharply-angled pieces of the interceptor's hull floated in a jagged cloud, partly obscuring their view of the emerald clouds behind. "Dax, scan that debris field and beam aboard anything that looks remotely interesting. We'll haul it back to DS-Nine and sort through it there. Then plot a course for home, warp five."

 "Captain," said the Worf-replicate. "I do not believe that the Borg will attack just yet. It will take their task force at _Deep Space Nine _a day or two to completely assimilate all technology and personnel: until they have completed that objective, we should not expect anything larger than a sphere ship."

"Alright. When we get back, I want you to brief me on the situation at your DS-Nine. I'll need a list of ships they had there when you left, as well as approximate maps of Borg territory in your universe. We'll reconvene in my office, at 1700 hours."


	9. Chapter 8

A few hours later, the senior staff had gathered in the expansive workplace of Captain Sisko, with the addition of the replicants. Located just off _Deep Space Nine_'s nerve centre, Ops, the office was decorated with keepsakes of the captain's life and career, from model starships to African artefacts, and even an ornate alien clock that he had built whilst under the influence of a strange non-corporeal entity. At the moment, Sisko was seated at his wide desk, framed by a large eye-shaped window that looked out onto the stars. He spent a second looking at the faces of his command crew: from Kira to Worf, Dax to O'Brien, Constable Odo the Founder, and Doctor Julian Bashir, the station's chief medical officer. They all displayed various expressions of anticipation, apprehension, and curiosity. He couldn't blame them: last time the Borg had staged an offensive on the Federation, a substantial portion of Starfleet's vessel complement had been destroyed or assimilated, and the lone cube that had so easily penetrated their defences had very nearly laid waste to Earth. 

"We all know why we're here," he began. "But in case you don't, here's the compressed version. Early this morning, a temporal rift opened up in the Denorios Belt. Our three wandering parallel crew members came through on a runabout almost identical to the _Rubicon_ currently sitting in the habitat ring. They informed us that they were from an alternate version of our reality: one in which the Federation is waging a near-hopeless battle against the Borg Collective. We encountered a Borg vessel from that reality during our investigation, and they managed to launch a probe through the anomaly before we could destroy them."

The replicant of Kira stood up, and Sisko nodded. "Here is our duplicate of Colonel Kira. She has prepared a short presentation to inform us about what their universe is like." He swept a hand in front of him, beckoning her to take the stage, so to speak. She hesitated a moment, then walked to a panel on the edge of his desk and slid an amber-coloured isolinear rod into a slot. "Lights," she said to the computer, and the office went dim, the lighting replaced by a shimmering three-dimensional hologram that hovered above Sisko's desk. It was a map of the Alpha Quadrant, with the territories of the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans highlighted. She pointed to the map with one long finger and started speaking.

"This is what your quadrant looks like right now. The Dominion may have some presence here, but as I understand, the war in this part of the galaxy is nearing a conclusion." She tapped a control on the desk, and the hologram highlighted the three main powers of the Alpha Quadrant, zooming in until they filled a substantial portion of the airspace above the desk. "Well, this is what my galaxy looks like." The Kira-replicant pressed another button, and suddenly the blue, red and green glows of the Federation and the Klingon and Romulan Empires shrank. A flicker of sadness washed over the Bajoran's face as a harsh grey presence overran the majority of the quadrant that was visible, and she zoomed back to the original perspective so the crew could get a feeling for the amount of invaded space.

"Here is the Alpha Quadrant of my universe," she said, somewhat bitterly. "We suspect that our universes diverged when the starship _Enterprise_ was destroyed near Wolf 359. Captain Picard was fully assimilated as Locutus, and the Borg went on to attack Earth. It took three years before they took the last pockets of Federation resistance: things disintegrated pretty quickly after that. Earth fell, and suddenly, the Federation was left without a focal point. It's been a while since then, and over seventy percent of Federation space has been overrun." She paused when she caught Worf's inquisitive stare. "The Klingons and Romulans haven't been doing much better. The Empire have about forty percent of their space under Borg control. The Romulans aren't letting on much, but we think they've lost about thirty percent." The Kira-replicant pressed another control, and a series of icons appeared on the mostly-grey map. "We made the decision to merge all our fleets together in an effort to more effectively take on the Borg. The Triumvirate, or the Alliance, operates under joint control across a series of decentralised tactical staging areas. Starbases and other heavily-concentrated outposts have proven inefficient, so we've been forced to work with smaller installations, some as remote as bunkers on distant worlds."

The Kira-replicant sighed, and watched as the holographic star chart morphed into a vessel that was familiar to everyone: a Borg cube, hovering menacingly near a smaller DS-Nine. "This was the last image we got as we left. One Borg vessel had overtaken the station, disabling our weapons and shields in a relatively short span of time. Only a handful of personnel were assimilated when we made our departure, but DS-Nine wasn't exactly packing any form of firepower that was really effective against the Borg. All our experimental technology is under wraps at secret testing stations scattered across the quadrant."

"Experimental technology?" asked Dax, enthused. "You mean devices that are geared to counter the Borg's adaptation speed?"

The Bajoran woman from an alternate universe shook her head helplessly. "I don't know. Only key staff are informed of the nature and location of the technology: if anyone on the front lines knew about it, the Borg would as soon as they assimilated them. It's all a very big secret."

Sisko was staring intently at the image. There seemed to be something in the hologram that intrigued him greatly. He spoke slowly, "What was the Borg's method to overrunning the station? How did they break through our shields?"

"They used a combination of weapons," growled the Worf-replicant. "I am unsure if the Borg have developed shield-draining weaponry in this reality, but in our case, they fired energy pulses at the station that soaked up the shields." At Sisko's nod, he continued. "They also had a modified tractor beam that caused interference with our shield integrity. All in all, it only took them a few minutes to puncture our defences."

He bowed his head a little in thanks, then waggled a finger at the hologram above his desk. "If I'm right, the Borg won't pass up an opportunity to overrun this much space. Think about it: a whole new Alpha Quadrant to conquer. We cannot run the risk of a Borg fleet coming through that temporal anomaly. Chief O'Brien, are we carrying any more self-replicating mines?"

The Irish Chief of Ops shook his head and leaned back a little in his chair. "One or two, but from what I've seen of this passageway between dimensions, there isn't enough matter to gather for self-replication. Besides, who knows what a mine blowing up will do to it?"

"Mmm. Dax, any results on our anomaly out there?"

"Almost all the tests are inconclusive," the Trill science officer replied. "But I did get some interesting spectroscopic readings. This isn't just some kind of rip between one universe and another." She took a breath and forced herself to slow down. "I think this is a form of artificial passageway that can cross the barriers between realities. An interdimensional wormhole, of sorts." With a hand that quivered with excitement, she ejected the Kira-replicant's isolinear rod and replaced it with her own, watching the bright blue-and-pink holo-graphic information dance above Sisko's desk. "Do you know what this means, Benjamin?"

Sisko contemplated the display, then shook his head. "Nope."

"If we find out how this passageway was constructed, we may be able to modify the technology and use it to fold space! We could be looking at a mode of travel that leaves warp drive behind with fuel-combustion engines!"

_Trust Dax to always see the optimism,_ Sisko mused. He watched Dax's image of the interdimensional wormhole rotate slowly near his head and furrowed his brow. "Well, now that we know what this thing is, our first order of business is to find out who built it." He looked to the three replicants expectantly. "I assume this is as much a mystery to you as it is to me?"

Three slow nods were all he got as responses. The Dax-replicant shrugged her shoulders and pointed towards the hologram. "We haven't had time to experiment with propulsive and locomotive technology, only our weapons and shielding. DS-Nine…_our_ DS-Nine…wasn't carrying any form of device that could generate this kind of thing. And as far as I know, the Triumvirate isn't working on space-folding or reality-warping mechanisms. I'd have to guess that this is the Collective's doing."

"But why?" Colonel Kira asked. "Why go to all that time and energy, making a tunnel between your dimension and ours?"

Her own doppelganger answered her question. "Look at these readings, Colonel. There's material coming through our end and out yours: it's like some great transdimensional siphon." She paused for emphasis, then continued: "I've known the Borg for quite a long time, Captain Sisko. I think we can safely assume that this is some kind of elaborate tactic of theirs."

"But for what purpose?"

"I don't know for sure, but I have an awful feeling that…computer, I want to run a hypothetical simulation, based on the data currently on the desk holographic display. Ready?"

"_Working,_" said the usually-uncooperative Cardassian computer, in a deceptively calm human female voice. "_Ready for input._"

The Kira-replicant stood up and wandered around the room. "According to Lieutenant Dax's spectrographic analysis, this temporal passageway is actually drawing particles of matter through from the far end. Does the flow rate increase proportionally to the passage's size?"

There was a short pause as the computer processed the Kira-replicant's input, then finally beeped and said, "_Affirmative. The flow rate is proportional to the physical size of the passageway._"

"Okay." She gestured to herself as she struggled to find the right phrasing. "Assuming that the passage will continually increase in size, predict an outcome for the siphon effect, in context with the various energy flows and oscillations in both the temporal rift and the Denorios Belt."

"_Working: calculated analysis and hypothetical outcomes will require additional sensor data. Estimated time to completion is approximately one hour, fifteen minutes._"

She glowered a little. "That's too long. Factor in decoded information from the alternate universe runabout _Rubicon_, as well as pertinent records from the _Defiant_. Ignore additional sensor data and predict an outcome."

"_Working. Estimated time to completion is approximately four minutes, thirty seconds._"

"It's a start," the Kira-replicant said to herself as she plonked back down in her chair. "When you're thankful for each additional day of unadulterated individuality, you learn to make the most of everything, including time." 

Speculations began to bounce around the office. The Daxs both agreed that the anomaly would not just continue to shunt material from one reality to the next: quantum physics and the multiple-worlds theory had equations that would prohibit that. They believed that there was most likely a critical-mass point where something spectacular would happen, but they couldn't be sure, seeing as this was the first rift of its kind ever found in either universe. Sisko, O'Brien and Bashir, whilst not as knowledgeable about this branch of science, thought that perhaps it could somehow be reversed to induce such an effect, namely the implosion of the passage. Worf and Kira just sat and watched the discussion, nodded and shaking their heads at appropriate intervals. They knew the rift existed. They wanted it gone. The rest was just details that led to their ultimate goal.

Finally, the computer sounded a triple beep and everyone went quiet in anticipation.

"_Hypothetical simulation completed._"

The Kira-replicant broke the silence. "State the most likely outcome, and the percentage probability of it occurring, assuming that the current parameters remain unaffected."

"_Most likely outcome: the temporal passageway in question will reach critical flow point in approximately nine days. At this point, particle flow into this reality will rapidly increase exponentially. The varying quantum resonances will result in severe disruptions within this reality. Without resistance, this critical flow point result will overrun this reality. Probability of occurrence: sixty-one-point-zero-one percent._"

A tension fell over the officers like a heavy blanket. Worried gazes met worried gazes as the holographic display sped up and altered itself to show the complete reconstruction of _Deep Space Nine_ and, eventually, the entire galaxy. It was an almost unthinkable event. Unthinkable, Sisko reminded himself, to individuals. The Borg would not be quite as vexed about the overtaking of this universe: more drones for them, as well as a whole new Collective to integrate. Sisko's head began to hurt as soon as he wondered what would happen to planets (such as Earth, for instance). Would the two worlds merge, or would they appear side-by-side? At any rate, he knew that he had to stop that happening, whatever the outcome. This was a completely new kind of physics, and while the computer could not ever predict the results accurately, its best guess was as good as his, and he couldn't allow the Borg to get their collective feet in the door to their reality.

"I don't suppose anyone has any ideas on how to close this thing?" he asked, feeling a headache beginning to build. He was not surprised when his senior staff, even the redoubtable Chief O'Brien, were silent. "Alright. Dax, O'Brien: I want you to oversee the debris-sifting operation. If you find anything — computer data, drone parts, equipment, _anything_ — that could give us a clue, call me down to the cargo bay. Dismissed."


	10. Chapter 9

"I won't let this happen!"

The indignant cry rang throughout the high-ceilinged casino and out into the noisy Promenade. Security chief Odo sighed once, trying to control his patience, then planted his hands firmly on the bar. Across from him was an exasperated Quark. "I know my rights, Constable! You can't send your men in here without a warrant. And seeing as you don't _have_ one, I suggest you keep away from my storage rooms." Burning protest flickered in the Ferengi's eyes. Odo shook his head a little. "I don't need a warrant, Quark, because I've got this." He waved a Bajoran padd in front of Quark's nose. "These are the engineering staff's latest scans of the power grid. Maybe you could tell me _why_ there is an anomalous energy usage spike in your bar before I send my people into the storage bays." A small smile of satisfaction crossed his partly-formed lips. 

"We've had a busy week," Quark fumed, pulling himself up to his full unimpressive height. "Now, seeing as that little misunderstanding is taken care of, don't let the door hit you on the way out." His protest was ignored as two burly Bajorans and a Starfleet woman moved towards the shadowy entrance to Quark's stores. "Stop! Stop right there, or…"

Odo glared at the Ferengi. "Or what? You'll call security?"

"This is corruption! I'll get Captain Sisko onto you!"

"Captain Sisko is occupied with far more important matters right now," Odo said rationally. "And even if he weren't, your usual illegal activities would not rank highly on his list of priorities. But, of course, they are at the top of _mine_." 

The security people returned from the back rooms. One of the Bajoran men, an officer by the name of Garrel Rem, was carrying a medium-sized black metal box. "We found this attached to a power grid step-down, sir," he said, placing the device on the bar for inspection. "There was a contraband energy shunt acting as a buffer, but it didn't seem to be functioning properly, so we left it in there."

"Well, well, well," Odo said. "A piggyback junction box. Let me guess: this was connected to the security net?"

Garrel looked somewhat surprised. "Uh…yes, sir."

"So, you're planning on subverting the station's security sensors. Might I ask why?"

Quark backed off a step or two, almost running into the replicators behind him. "This isn't what you think, gentlemen," he said smoothly. "That isn't a junction box — it's a storage capacitor. I was charging it up so it could be used as a stand-alone generator for the emergency lights." He explained it as a little child might explain something to a parent.

Odo drilled the Ferengi with a stare. "Then why was it hooked up to an illegal power shunt and our own sensor net? Please, Quark, you're going to have to do better than that. Garrel, take everything you found down to the offices. We'll sort it out back there. As for you, Quark, I think you'll find that there is a hefty fine waiting for you. Improper use of the power grid, disturbing the station's sensor network, interfering with station security, and bringing contraband equipment on-board. This may be my lucky day."

His triumph was interrupted by the chirp of his comm badge. _"Kira to Odo."_

The shapeshifter fired a last glance at Quark before tapping the badge on his uniform. "This is Odo. Go ahead, Colonel."

_"We've been getting some strange readings from sections twelve and thirteen of the habitat ring. The security net is fluctuating in that area; are you free to check it out?"_

"Very soon, Colonel. I just have a snoop to deal with first. Odo out." He figured that the irregular readings would probably be from Quark's little machine. He would go down in an hour or two with one of the station's engineers and examine the systems, find no problems, and come back up to his office. "I'll deal with you later," he snapped at Quark, waving a hand at Garrel to finish up. The young Bajoran could certainly take care of the situation and organise for the appropriate fines to be handed out. Meanwhile, he would tie up some data reports (which Sisko referred to as 'paperwork' — an archaic phrase that Odo didn't understand, seeing as no paper was involved), then check out the habitat ring. 


	11. Chapter 10

"Careful…careful…alright, hold it."

Three young Starfleet officers sweated and strained while they held up the huge chunk of blackened metal. Chief O'Brien stood at a wall console, tapping buttons and adjusting the cargo bay's antigrav loader to hold the piece of Borg debris in place. The _Defiant_ had beamed out six or seven hefty bits of the interceptor, and hundreds of smaller pieces; over in the corner, Dax and another member of the science staff were poking and prodding a former drone's prosthetic arm with their tricorders. O'Brien watched them for a moment, then finished calibrating the loader before shouting, "Okay, let go and we'll see if it holds!" His voice rang tinnily in the cavernous chamber. 

Each of the officers backed away from the metal lump, their shoulders sagging in relief as the antigrav fields held it upright. O'Brien grabbed his own tricorder off an equipment locker and ran it over the debris. "We'll need to get this crust off if we're going to get any decent analysis done," he commented to himself. The explosion of the Borg interceptor had covered each item in a thick scab of carbon. He picked up a tool from a bench and started to vapourise the black gunk, careful to avoid bits of Borg technology underneath. This was how he preferred to interact with the Collective — up close and right with the machinery. The drones, while fascinating as technological constructs, were too dangerous for him. Soon he had broken away the obsidian coating and was getting into the dull pewter clump of metal. It turned out that they had rescued a fragment of drone alcove; only two-and-a-half alcoves were intact. The rest must have been burned up by phaser fire. O'Brien reactivated his tricorder and started checking for any undamaged memory nodes, hoping for some modicum of success, anything that would make their search worthwhile.

At last, he found a chain of four, strung up like technological pearls in a necklace. The tiny screen of the tricorder vomited up line after line of green Borg 'text' that, at the moment, was nothing more than gobbledegook to him. He hoped that the duplicates might be able to decipher it. "O'Brien to Sisko," he said to the busy cargo bay.

_"Sisko here. What is it, Chief?"_

"From initial sweeps, it looks like we didn't grab much debris that'll be of interest, sir." He paused as the tricorder began to wail in his hands. "Hello…what's this, then?"

_"Come again, Chief?"_

"We got the bigger part of a drone sleeping block, and there's some uncorrupted computer memory I got off the tricorder. It looks like there's a few recognisable star charts here. Shall I save the information to the station computer systems?"

_"Yes. Then get one of the alternate replicants to look at it; they may be able to interpret what our computers can't. Did you uncover anything on the passageway and how it works?"_

O'Brien sighed. "Not as yet, sir. Well, I can't tell, at this stage." He tapped the controls to transfer the data directly into the space station's memory banks. "I'll keep up the search. Perhaps something else will turn up. O'Brien out." He waited until the communication channel shut off, then let out another breath. Sisko probably wouldn't be happy to know that the alcoves were the biggest thing the _Defiant_ had managed to beam out. Everything else was tiny in comparison; bits of drones, structural supports, light fittings, and the remnant of a transwarp coil housing. O'Brien's keen engineering sense was eager to see if he could integrate the Borg's ultra-advanced transwarp propulsive technology into the _Defiant_'s already-overpowered engines, but that kind of operation would require half the ship's power supply to be rewired. And who knew what it would do to the cloaking device? He would toy with the idea in a simulation later. He closed up the tricorder and wiped the sweat from his face. It was awfully _hot_ in the cargo bay, despite its size and recent exposure to hard vacuum. 

He sat back and let a few of his assistants shift the alcove over to one corner. It had been over an hour since the start of the sifting, and his recent discovery had been the total of their success. It felt futile. But then, wasn't that what the Borg were all about? He wished that the _Defiant_ had a bigger cargo bay, rather than the one tiny space aboard the warship. That way, he could have brought more back, and hopefully have made Sisko happy. Silently, O'Brien wondered how Sisko was holding up. After all, the last time he had seen the Borg, they had destroyed his ship and killed his wife. O'Brien had been in the same fight, but was on the _Enterprise_, which had survived and saved the day.

_Only in this timeline, Miles. Only in this timeline._ He reminded himself that the second Dax, Kira, and Worf had come from a universe where the _Enterprise_ had been destroyed. Apparently, he had escaped to serve on DS-Nine, but only to be assimilated. 

Assimilated. Incorporated into the hideous whole.

"Get back to work, Miles," he said to himself, shaking his head at how easily he had been drawn in to the daydreaming. He had been assimilated in another _universe_. It had not happened here. Yet. But he would do everything he could to make sure that it didn't happen to him, or Captain Sisko, or anyone else. And that included getting on with this debris-sifting. He wiped his hands on the sides of his legs and picked up a fried piece of casing: his tricorder told him that it had once housed a part of the shield matrix. Deep down, O'Brien knew that there would be next to nothing of real interest in the debris cloud, because Borg ships were designed to destroy all useful technology when they exploded. But he continued in the off chance that something useful would turn up. 

The sound of fabric against the bulkhead was negligible. This part of the habitat ring had walls made of solid duranium, but somehow, voices always managed to carry. In this case, the couple standing in the hall didn't seem interested in whispering anyhow. With arms wrapped around each other, it would have been superfluous. Soon enough, though, the small badge on the woman's arm chirped, and she broke off the contact to answer the call.

_"Captain Yates?" _came a male voice.

Kasidy Yates sighed and stepped back for a second, her eyes never breaking from her companion's. "Go ahead, Beraal."

_"The cargo is all loaded in, and we've got departure clearance. We're ready to cast off, ma'am."_

"Be right there. Yates out." She sighed and looked to Benjamin Sisko with a pout on her lips. He brushed a hand across her smooth cheek, drawing her closer. "Mmm," she whispered. "I have a ship waiting for me." The words were hollow — Yates knew that the _Xerxes _could wait a few more minutes. However, she didn't want to delay the rest of her crew by hanging around with her companion. 

"Do you have to go?" Sisko asked, a playful grin beginning to form on his lips. "I could always arrange for an inconvenient accident with the docking clamps…"

"Why, Benjamin, is that a note of pure concern I detect in your voice?" she asked.

"I'm wounded," he replied, in his most un-wounded voice, dark eyes gleaming. "You know, Kasidy, I find you…intoxicating."

Yates returned the grin and pecked Sisko on the cheek. "Alright, I give up. But I had better go now. It's a long run from here to Earth, and my customers are desperate to get this equipment." She scooped up her bag and started down the corridor. 

"Okay. I'll be counting the minutes until you get back."

She turned. "Didn't your mother tell you not to lie?"

"My mother never said anything about embellishment."

"Hmmm. So, Jake isn't the only one, eh?" A sweet melody of laughter rang in the hall for a moment before echoing away through the habitat ring. "Goodbye, Benjamin."

The playfulness was gone. "Goodbye, Kasidy." He watched her walk until she reached a turbolift, where she requested the docking ring and promptly vanished. Was this how they were destined to be? Ships that pass in the night? Sisko shook his head slowly. He wished that he had more _time_. More time for Kasidy, more time for Jake, more time for everything. With the tide of the Dominion stemmed for the moment, it would have been logical for Sisko to have a little time off. But then the Borg from another reality had popped in for a visit. His fist clenched. He wished for the umpteenth time that Borg drones were more vulnerable to hand-to-hand. Then, they would have to answer to Ben Sisko. In person. 

It occurred to him that the replicants had been on the station for a day or two now. The computer system they had salvaged from the runabout should have been decoded, so he swung around and followed DS-Nine's network of hallways back up to the central spine of the station. It would have been far quicker to catch a turbolift, but he was never one to shirk exercise, and it made him feel a little better when he burned off some energy. The science labs were only a short hike.

_Deep Space Nine's _often-used scientific facilities were now rarely occupied. Starfleet's desperate attempts to drive back the Jem'Hadar had resulted in taking as many members of the science division as they could and pressing them into research for newer and more destructive weapons. Dax was now the only regular to the labs, and it was usually to analyse the latest tactical cartography data. Now, though, it had a new and brighter purpose: to save the galaxy from Borg invasion. The primary science laboratory was dominated by a freestanding border of Cardassian-designed consoles, with a multisource analysis device set into the middle. A standard Starfleet runabout computer core hovered above it, suspended in a stasis field that glittered like a swarm of tiny golden dust motes. Various readouts displayed the results of the station's decryption.

Kira, Worf, and Dax, dimension-wandering parallels of the crew, wandered between the different terminals, prodding screens. Sisko walked in and they all looked upwards at once. "At ease," he said with a wave. "I was just checking up on your progress."

Colonel Kira seemed to have become the spokesperson of the trio, so she stepped away from the display and nodded. "We've done it, sir. The encryption codes are broken, and Dax has managed to reconstruct some of the corrupted data. The results will doubtlessly prove useful. We've got star charts, tactical downloads, ship profiles, access codes, Borg outpost deployments…everything we need to conduct a rescue operation."

"A rescue operation?" Sisko echoed.

"Of course. I…" Kira suddenly realised that she had overstepped her authority. "I'm sorry, Captain. I guess…I guess I got used to command after you were…" she stopped when tears began to run hot in her eyes, blinking them away angrily. "I assumed that we would be making a run through the passageway and reclaiming _Deep Space Nine_. The Alliance is losing right now, and what we need is a bastion, a statement that says that we're willing to fight. I believe that DS-Nine is that bastion, and I am ready and able to lead a strike force against the Borg."

Benjamin was slightly taken aback at the fiery determination that burned in her eyes. _She's had a long fight,_ he told himself. _And she's quite possibly lost Bajor in that fight. _But if Bajor was gone, that would mean a whole planetful of Borg nearby, just waiting to ambush any ship that dared violate the Borg sovereignty. Was a strike going to be wise? On one hand, DS-Nine would hold valuable information, and would aid in the Alliance's fight against the Collective. But then, anything short of hundreds of ships would likely be overwhelmed. Sisko decided to be diplomatic. "I don't know if that's such a good idea yet, Colonel. Our first priority is to identify what opened that rift, and see if we can close it." He held up a hand when a protest began to form on her lips. "But, if we can take back DS-Nine, all the better. Now, show me what you've got."

A holographic screen popped into existence at eye level, and a thousand pictures began to play across its surface. They were Borg ships. Each one was a different shape, but each had a kind of geometrical efficiency and simplicity that was the trademark of their hideous fleet. Leaden cubes, pewter-coloured spheres, frame-like diamonds that cradled a cobalt sphere, interceptors that resembled torpedoes, comet-like lumps of metal, and several other designs that flashed by too quickly to make out. Lieutenant Dax studiously pressed a few controls. "Our schematics of Borg vessel interiors are fairly sketchy; most away teams that manage to get in don't get out. But we've got plenty of scans of the outsides." She sighed. "I have to admire their determination. They've made ships far bigger than anything we've built, and yet they still manage to beat us to a bloody pulp. They have a kind of…mathematical precision and purity." When she caught the glare Worf was giving her, she shook her head. "Don't get me wrong," she said, voice beginning to flare. "I'm not a collaborator. But from a scientific point of view, it's amazing that they've made such decentralised and ungainly-looking things actually _work_."

"There are collaborators?" Sisko asked.

Now Kira jumped back into the conversation. "Oh, yes." Those two words were brimming with malice. "A few individuals see the Borg's quest for 'perfection' as some kind of…of…holy crusade. We don't know how they did it, but they were able to bargain with the drones and transmit vessel deployments, schematics, astrogation data, the works. Because of them, we've lost hundreds of ships, thousands of lives. The collaborators are sick, sick people, sir. We've adopted a policy where if we find one, we kill them." Sisko's eyes widened. "There has to be concrete proof, of course, but these are desperate times. We can't afford to have spies for the Collective amongst our own." 

Sisko nodded soberly. He hadn't realised that things had deteriorated that far in this alternate version of the Alpha Quadrant. Were they destined to end up the same way? He wasn't sure. Before he could descend further into reverie, he was interrupted by Dax changing the holographic display to show a familiar map of the Bajor system.

"These were the last long-range scans taken by the _Rubicon_," she commented. The tiny double-ring of DS-Nine was being encroached upon by a trio of Borg symbols, which Sisko knew to be one cube and two spheres. "If memory serves, the attack force will assimilate the station and establish an outpost. Then, they'll start taking the planet with a combination of beaming up targets and sending down groups of drones." She tapped the board once, then nodded as a figure came up in a small window. Sisko noted that it was a very small figure. "If our rough estimates are anywhere near accurate, it'll only take them four days to completely take over Bajor and begin to fortify _Deep Space Nine_ as a permanent fixture."

"Damn," said Sisko.

"If we're going to strike, it'll have to be before then," Kira remarked with certainty. "One cube probably won't be able to handle that many new candidates for assimilation. They'll either bring in more ships, or they'll make the station as impregnable as they can. My suggestion is that we leave immediately, sir."

The captain waved a hand at the display. "What about the _Defiant? _Does she still exist in your reality?"

Kira bobbed her head once, causing her earring to jangle. "Yep. She was on the other side of the wormhole when the Borg attacked. If they've come back before now, the cube would surely have overwhelmed them. The _Defiant_'s tough, but not enough against that kind of firepower." Her voice soured. "Not when it's being commanded by Odo. He doesn't think like the rest of us: he takes the most obvious course of action, the most _honourable_ course of action, and the Borg will be ready for that. If he's popped back through the wormhole, he's going to greet us with 'lower your shields and surrender your ships'."

Sisko had to agree. Constable Odo was an alien in a strange quadrant, a Founder, a member of an elite race of shapeshifters who ruled the all-mighty Dominion. He was intelligent and logical, but that was exactly what the Borg would be ready for. If the choice was between luring the enemy into a volatile gas cloud or a long retreat which would likely see their destruction, Odo would choose the second option, simply because it was not a deception. Odo despised lawless deception, and in a wartorn reality where individuality was a precious commodity, he would not last long if he was in command. Sisko made an executive decision and nodded at Kira.

"Alright, you've convinced me. We'll do a reconnaissance run through the passageway once the _Thunderchild_ and the _Sarekar_ get here. Have the Borg managed to find a way through conventional cloaking technology?" he asked.

"That depends; your cloaking device may be different to ours. We'll have a look at the specs. How many ships will we be taking?"

"Only the _Defiant_. We can't risk discovery just yet."

"One?" Kira fumed. "Sir, if the Borg see you, even if it's only for a second, they'll find a way to scan through the cloaking field. That's when it's all over for you. If we have any chance of survival — "

Sisko glowered at her. "_If_ we have any chance of survival, Colonel, we'll be safer in one ship, rather than three. The _Defiant_ is the only ship in the fleet with a cloak installed permanently, and I intend to press that advantage until the Borg pick up on it." He leaned down and pressed a few keys on one of the consoles. "This terminal is now configured to display the cloaking device files. Once you're finished, close it down and reset the interface. Do you have any basic strategy we should follow?"

A low rumble from Worf indicated that he had an idea. He was less of a tactical thinker than Kira, but he probably had more experience with fighting the Borg, both in hand-to-hand and ship-to-ship. "If the Borg suspect the presence of a cloaked ship, they will try and adapt their sensors to detect it. It would be best if you kept a distance of at least twenty-five thousand kilometres. Operating the impulse engines in short bursts wouldn't leave a continuous impulse trail. Does your ship have a silent-running status?"

"No," Sisko said thoughtfully. "But Mister O'Brien can probably rig one up."

"Good. Low power and thermal emissions could mean the difference between detection and a successful run. Shutting down the weapons systems would also be wise." He frowned for a moment. "We've found that jumping to high warp from a standstill while cloaked leaves a residual energy reading that Borg sensors can track. If it's necessary to travel at anything higher than warp four, it is better to work up the scale incrementally."

The captain returned the grimace. "I'll keep that in mind. I can't believe I'm doing this, but we leave in three hours."


	12. Chapter 11

Julian Bashir, genetically-engineered doctor, surgeon, therapist, and all-round good guy, checked the screen on another padd, then tossed it into a pile. It had only taken him a few seconds to read the lines of eye-friendly orange text, but in that tiny space of time, he had already picked out key words, determined its usefulness, and discarded it. The _Defiant_ was certainly not Starfleet's smallest ship. Bashir had, however, taken enough trips on the warship to know that space was certainly at a premium, especially in the poor excuse for a sickbay. They were taking a trip into a Bajor sector controlled by a mortal enemy. He had downloaded all the files he could dig up on the Borg Collective, as well as various papers on restoring an assimilated drone back to individuality, and jammed them into a boxful of padds for the journey. 

But even now, he could feel doubt gnawing at the fringes of his brain. Bashir knew that it was because he would possibly face not only the new dimension on the other side of the passage, but the new frontier of fighting Borg nanoprobes on the operating table. He had never personally encountered the machine-men; when Worf had bravely commandeered the _Defiant_ during the last incursion, he had been assisting a clinic with a medication supply issue on Bajor. He knew that they were fascinating from a xenobiological perspective. If he could study a drone unimpeded, it would make an excellent topic for his next contribution to the Federation medical journals. There was also a healthy dose of apprehension mixed in with his optimism, though. No species on file had managed to repel the Borg and keep them out of their space for good. Only a handful of starships had survived the last encounter with a cube, which only proved that Federation weapons had a limited effectiveness at the best of times against the Collective's huge vessels. How much more effective would his hyposprays and surgical tools be against an assimilated crew member? Sisko's battle would be fought outside the ship; Bashir's would be inside the patient. The engineered analytical part of his mind knew that this was only a scout mission to observe the situation at DS-Nine, but his more human heart told him otherwise.

_"Bridge to sickbay,"_ said the intercom.

"Approaching passageway," Dax called from the helm. 

The Kira-replicant looked up from Tactical II. Half of her battle-worn face was lit up green, distorting the curves of her cheek until they became eerie and cold. "No sign of Borg activity, captain," she said. With that, the ship bucked gently as it came to a stop at the edge of the emerald hurricane before them. The Bajoran cringed at the sight of it. Her own reality had been overrun by an evil bent on remaking everything in its own twisted image, and now that evil was threatening a new and untainted universe. She would not let that happen, even if it meant her own death. Was she willing to die for these people? Sisko, O'Brien, Bashir…she had known them before, but then they had been assimilated. And now, she had a chance to know them again. If only things had been _different_.

"Here goes," Captain Sisko said. "Computer, confirm shield modifications."

_"Shield modifications complete and on-line," _came the reply.

"Alright. Bridge to sickbay."

There was a rustling on the other side of the line before a weary voice replied, _"Bashir here. What do you need, sir?"_

"Just checking that you're ready for our little spin," the captain mentioned.

_"We're stocked well enough, and my usual contingent of medical staff has been briefed on what to do if we get some uninvited guests. I'd say we're as ready as can be."_

Sisko shuffled a bit in his chair. "Good. We're about to enter the passage; keep an eye on the crew to see if it does anything to us. Sisko out." He tapped the controls on his chair and fixed his gaze on the temporal wormhole. "Dax…take us in."

There was a subtle shift in gravity, and suddenly the _Defiant_ was inside a haze of colour. Energy began to wash over the modified shields and push the ship around a little. Jadzia compensated where she could. She tweaked the impulse engines up a notch, and suddenly they were over the threshold and falling down into the heart of the tempest. That much was obvious when the bulkheads suddenly became invisible. Consoles and crew members faded in and out randomly.

"What the hell is going on?" Sisko demanded.

"Temporal displacement," Dax commented as she touched a control before blinking out. Her normally-strong voice became a tenuous, quiet thread of noise until she and the helm/ops station came back to the bridge. "…interesting. I never predicted this, Benjamin." She turned and squinted at him. "Benjamin?"

"What?"

But she could not see him, and Sisko realised that he was probably invisible, just as she had been moments earlier. She picked up on it quicker than he did. "It seems as though bits and pieces of the ship are phasing out in the temporal stream. It shouldn't pose too much of a problem for now, but we can't risk prolonged exposure. I…" Dax paused momentarily as she became translucent, then finally looked over at Sisko, seeing him for the first time again. "Nice of you to join me," she said wryly.

He smiled a little. "I think I deserve to be the one saying that. Just get us through to the other side," he said with a nod. "I don't know if I can stand this funhouse-mirror stuff."

With a final shuddering protest, the temporal passageway spat them out. Dax worked the controls and tried to steer them into a tight turn that kept them within the cover provided by the misty jade clouds. She brought them to a stop and nodded. "We're clear of the mouth, sir. I'm not seeing any vessel activity nearby, but I can't be sure on passive scans. If I could run even one standard sweep…"

"No!" shouted the Worf-replicant, standing up from his stool with a bit too much force. "The Borg will no doubt be watching this wormhole of theirs. Any regular sensor activity will show up and we will have to deal with a defence force." His skin blanched a little as he looked past Sisko, past Dax, to the viewscreen. "By Kahless…" he muttered. The others turned and saw nothing but the star-spattered darkness. Then, if they peered at one spot for a second or two, they could make out a tiny grey smudge. "Computer, isolate and magnify section nine-A on the viewscreen. Compensate for distance."

The image refreshed, now displaying a view much closer than the _Defiant_ was. The grey mark had now ballooned to become a tangle of straight lines and harsh angles, backlit by a cold green light. Sisko knew that this was a Borg station of some form. It seemed to be made up of a central bolus that was linked to massive arrays made up of seemingly-delicate girders; on the screen, it looked to be fairly small, but then he saw a cube nudged up beside it, and got a sense for its real size. Someone whispered a curse as they picked up on the same thing. It wasn't huge, but it was fairly hefty. And by the looks of things, it was nowhere near completion. 

"A construction array," spat the Kira-replicant. "This could be a problem. It's normally used as a power generator for larger structures. Sometimes they don't even bother to take it away at the end: they just mix it into whatever they're building. Looks to me like they're making something big, though."

"Opinions?" Sisko asked her.

The Bajoran shrugged. "I can't tell you at this stage. It could be a nexus so they can control their operations in this sector, but I figured that it would have been more efficient to modify DS-Nine for that function. It's certainly carrying more powerful communications devices. Maybe this is how they made the passageway."

As if on cue, the Worf-replicant looked up from the auxiliary stations at the back and cast a nod in Sisko's direction. He had voluntarily given up the Tactical stations so he could work with the Dax-replicant on various computer simulations, using the data from the _Rubicon_'s recovered core as a base. "That was not present when we entered the conduit, but we hardly had time for full sensor scans. The large arrays could be field emitters to keep the instability to a minimum." He snarled a little. "Captain, if the structure does not already have defensive shields built into it, there will be a projector platform somewhere nearby to keep it protected. Permission to start searching our scan results for such a platform."

"Granted."

For a few minutes, everyone had their heads bent over their consoles, looking through the first sweeps for a clue as to the purpose of the mysterious station. Sisko stood up after a while and paced around to the Kira-replicant. Her screens showed nothing in range other than the structure on the screen. Amazingly, it seemed that they had not been detected. "Let's do this quickly and quietly," he said to her. "Keep phasers and torpedo tubes on passive only; I want no telltale energy emissions. Activate the cloak on my mark." He paused. "Bridge to Engineering. Activate reduced-power mode. Flush the propulsion vents with coolant, then close up the temperature vents. Impulse and warp drive, if you please."

_"Acknowledged, sir. We've sealed the vents. Give me a moment, and I'll put this baby to sleep…okay, impulse cut-offs set to seventy percent and warp cut-offs now at warp four."_

"Thank-you. Kira, the cloaking device."

The viewscreen fritzed for a moment, then the regular bridge lights were replaced with red glowtubes that brought out the console illumination that much more. A Romulan icon appeared on the Tactical II screen, then on Sisko's chair panel. Dax turned around to look at the Bajoran and the human. "With the impulse heat vents closed, we'll reach the maximum safe point in an hour, if we run the drives continuously. I've found a quiet spot in the shadow of Jeraddo to rinse out the excess heat when that happens. Same goes with warp drive."

Sisko bobbed his head once at the Trill. "Good thinking. Take us to one-quarter impulse, direct course to _Deep Space Nine_. Remember to run the engines in short bursts to cover our trail. We can't risk getting caught at this point."

A slight tremor told them that the _Defiant_ was now biting eagerly at the space in front of it, bounding forward as Dax skilfully ran the sublight drive for ten or fifteen seconds, then put them in standby and let the momentum send them forwards, until they slowed down a little and she applied some more power. It was a clumsy and inefficient way to fly, but no-one was complaining as long as it meant that the Borg couldn't see them. It took them nearly half an hour to get there, but finally they arrived at DS-Nine.

It was still the same basic shape, but it was somehow inexplicably, unutterably _different_. There were gaping tears in the duranium walls where weapons had sliced through like Garak's old-fashioned scissors had through a piece of fabric. In fact, the docking ring had buckled in several places, if the fuzzy image was correct. But what worried everyone was the spires that poked through, or the machinery that seemed to grow out of the breaches like sinister weeds crawling towards space. It was as if the Borg had germinated a hideous techno-organic seed in the heart of the Cardassian station, and it had spread through the hallways and maintenance tunnels, climbing outwards to bathe in the cold light of the Bajoran sun. Sisko balked at the sight. It was as if he was looking at the violated corpse of an old friend…or the burnt shell of a familiar house. How much worse was it for the replicants? He glanced sideways at Kira, and she was staring at the screen with shock and fury in her eyes. Her jaw was locked. 

"I was expecting this," she said through grinding teeth. "but I didn't ever think it'd feel this bad. I mean, look at it!" One hand pointed indignantly at the viewscreen. "They've taken our home and twisted it into…into…something else. Prophets, what happens now? Earth, Trill, Vulcan, and now DS-Nine. How much more can we take before we give in?" 

The Worf-replicant went to her side and laid a brawny hand on her shoulder. "We will take it back, Colonel. Somehow, we will push the Borg out and restore DS-Nine." The Bajoran choked back an angry sob, then nodded. "Do not worry," he comforted. "we have the might of the Federation at our backs once again. After the admirals see these pictures, I'm sure they will be tripping over themselves to mass a war fleet."

Through her anguish, she did not notice a lamp start blinking on her console. Worf leaned over her shoulder and pressed it, then grimaced at the results. "Borg cube approaching us, sir! Zero-point-eight of warp speed."

"That's too fast for an attack run," Sisko mused. "But then, the Borg don't exactly stick to anything orthodox. Prepare for red alert. Don't touch anything unless they open fire on us."

Everyone watched as a leaden speck on the screen grew quickly to become a huge square that appeared two-dimensional, until it vectored to the right to show its depth. The cube was bigger than DS-Nine, and probably just as well armed, and yet they were right in its path. Could they be seen? So far, they had followed every precaution and kept to a safe distance, but perhaps their plan had been foiled. Nothing was foolproof, after all. Sisko glowered as the cube rushed towards them, as if he could turn aside the leviathan ship with his icy gaze. He was certain that they were flying in the face of danger: he opened his mouth to issue orders. His instincts screamed, _Run! Run! Put the shields up and run like hell, because no starship can stop the Borg. _Sisko drew a breath and angled his head towards the replicants.

But then the cube hurtled straight past them, roaring by in a blur of motion. The pewter ship has come so close that the _Defiant_ was rattled by the engine wake. Sisko gripped his chair until it had passed them. "Why the hell did they do that?"

"Incoming vessels, sir. Cardassian warships," the Worf-replicant growled, then tossed the image up on the screen.

The wedge-formation of five yellow starships was darting towards the passageway's mouth, and for a moment, it seemed as though they would outrun the Borg. But the cube was too fast. Way, way too fast. It caught one in a tractor beam. Two other warships moved to defend it, and they were dispatched by two torpedoes that issued from some unseen orifice on the surface of the ship's skin. One of the remainder opened fire on the cube and dodged, but was caught by a devastating ray of bright that lanced right down the ship's axis, igniting the forward disruptor batteries and blowing the ship to kingdom come. Whichever gul was commanding the surviving ship decided to flee; as it turned, a second tractor beam lashed out. It was unable to get a solid grip on the warship itself, but it caught on the tail and yanked ruthlessly. The long boom of the aft was ripped clear off the rest of the sandy-coloured ship. Atmosphere and Cardassians bloomed into open space as the cube slowly pivoted and shot back towards DS-Nine with its prize.

"I didn't think the Borg took ships," Dax commented.

"They don't," the Worf-replicant replied. "Cardassian warships have a crew of about three hundred potential drones, but they don't have any technology that the Borg are interested in. I am unsure why they have suddenly decided to take captives."

"It can't be anything desperate. Out of a possible five, they only stole one ship," Dax replied. Then a beep distracted her, and she looked at a timer on the helm. "Impulse temperature hitting first warning mark. Alter course to Jeraddo, sir?"

Sisko nodded thoughtfully. "Yes. Then take us home. I think I've got enough evidence to convince the admirals of the threat now."


	13. Chapter 12

Odo watched the viewscreen and realised that Starfleet vessels, with the possible exception of the _Defiant_, were certainly not built for wartime duty. The _Thunderchild_ and the _Sarekar_ had arrived while Sisko and his crew were in the other reality, and the station had been relatively quiet, so the changeling had devoted his time to visually analysing the long curves of the two Akira-class ships. They were medium-grade warships with a respectable arsenal onboard (or so the Starfleet files had told him). But they still embodied the usual Starfleet preoccupation with structural aesthetics and grace, and that left a lot of weak points. One solid, unshielded phaser hit would tear the saucer section clear of the drive nacelles. Despite his dislike for the corrupt Cardassian navy, he had admired the utilitarian and compact warships. He had submitted numerous requests to the Federation's tactical designers for an overhaul of ship layout guidelines, and he was only now seeing the newer ships being built with an emphasis on low profile and manoeuvrability, rather than size and capacity. But the vessels he saw on the holographic screen right now…Odo couldn't decide what to think. The _Defiant_ was nosed up to the docking ring, and Sisko had requested a staff meeting soon, meaning that Odo needed to write a tactical assessment on DS-Nine's defensive capabilities against any threat forces. At least, that was what he assumed the Starfleet man wanted to discuss in the meeting. 

Sisko's dark-skinned features had looked haunted on the comm display. Odo couldn't recall seeing that kind of horror on the captain's face before, not even when the war with the Dominion had been announced. That meant that the _Defiant_ had found something terrifying on the other side of the passage, and Odo wasn't sure he wanted to know what that was. He walked across to an auxiliary terminal on the other side of Ops, sat down, and activated the station computer interface.

_"Ready,"_ the computer said politely. Odo marvelled that it was co-operating for once.

"Computer, how much does the station LCARS have on the Borg Collective?"

The system paused as it did quick scan of its archives. _"The station computer contains four hundred kiloquads on the Borg Collective."_

Odo wasn't terribly familiar with standard Federation units of data measurements, but he knew that four hundred kiloquads wasn't a great deal of information. At least, it probably wasn't anything of substance. "What does this consist of?"

_"History of Federation interactions with the Borg; records of Borg incursions into the Alpha Quadrant; analyses of alternate universe data concerning Borg technology…"_

"Stop," the changeling said. It would take too long. He needed more information, and he needed it quickly. "Uplink to fleet-wide Federation files. Cross-reference with tactical concerns: I want battle records, weaponry, shields, effective countermeasures, anything pertinent to a hypothetical conflict between _Deep Space Nine_ and the Borg."

_"Uplink initiated. This request has been lodged with the Federation archive computers. Estimated time to retrieval and download of requested data: two hours, seventeen minutes. Please wait."_

"Send the files to my office and put a level two firewall on them. Notify me when the download and lockdown is complete." Odo pushed away from the console, feeling as though he had accomplished nothing. DS-Nine was obviously not on the front lines with the Borg, but he felt that if the Federation feared the Borg as much as it seemed, every outpost should have sufficient data to prepare the crew for a combat. He sighed, a human nuance he had picked up, seeing as he did not require breath, and went back to watching the two Starfleet ships on the viewscreen.

Starfleet was certainly _not _built for wartime duty.

Then, Sisko's office doors opened.

"Benjamin, how did it go?"

"Sir? Are we getting reinforcements?"

"Captain, there has been a six-percent growth in the passageway…"

"Hold it!"

Ben Sisko held up a hand as he was assaulted from all fronts. The frantic questions and reports died away after a moment. "I just finished speaking with Admiral Roleman, of Starfleet Command," he boomed into Ops. The silence was almost deafening. "She finally agrees with our request for more ships, but apparently, there's a problem." The burble of voices started again until Sisko opened his mouth. "She's promised us a total complement of fifteen starships, plus the three here at the station. Those fifteen are now en route. However, it seems that Starfleet isn't prepared to defend _Deep Space Nine_ to the last man. Eighteen ships is all we'll have until the rest of the Eighth Fleet comes out of repairs."

The statement rang in the quiet for a second, then Kira pounced at the news. "Eighteen?"

"Yes."

"How long until the Eighth is ready to disembark?" Dax asked nervously.

Sisko sighed. "The admiral believes they'll be ready in two weeks."

"Two weeks?" Kira exclaimed. "In two weeks, the rift will have reached critical mass! We can't afford to just sit on our hands and wait!"

"I know," the captain said, trying to soothe the Bajoran's temper. "Which is why I'm going to get us the Sixth Fleet instead. They're on patrol duties, and shouldn't be missed. They can be here before the end of tomorrow. Colonel, I also want you to open negotiations with the Bajoran armed forces. See if you can secure any more ships. We've got a war to fight here, and I'll be damned if we lose it."

Kira bobbed her head. "Aye, sir."

"Odo! Have you got a tactical analysis ready?" Sisko asked. The changeling shook his head demurely as a response. "Not yet, captain. I'm still gathering my data. I'll submit it to you as soon as I'm finished."

Dax popped her head out from behind a support column and drilled Sisko with an enquiring stare. "Ben, I know you've probably thought of this, but how are we going to get a hold of the Sixth Fleet without disobeying Roleman?"

"Easy. Do you remember anyone named Sara Riverstone?"

"Of course. You and her have been friends since the Academy."

"I've done my homework, and I found out that she was appointed commander of the Sixth just after the war ended. It's unlikely that she'll be happy on patrol, so if I can convince her to make enough noise, we can get them here."

"But inside of today?"

"That's the easy part," he said with a wave. "Sara can be a _very_ loud person."

His comm badge chirruped, and he tapped it with a slight frown. "Sisko here."

_"Incoming priority transmission for Captain Benjamin Sisko, originating from Admiral Riverstone of the Sixth Fleet," _the computer announced for him. Sisko smiled knowingly at Dax before tapping a control in front of him. "Route transmission to the Ops viewscreen."

The two Akira-class ships winked out, to be replaced with the face of Sara Riverstone. She was about fifty years old, her black hair now tinged with streaks of silver that made her look more distinguished than aged. Her countenance still held a lot of youth, but it was marred by lines; not the lines of laughter, but of loss. Riverstone had previously been in command of a starbase that had been destroyed by a Dominion offensive. Thanks to her tactical thinking, hundreds of lives and fourteen ships had been saved, but the casualties had not been light. Like most everyone else in the admiralty, she had then pushed for her own ship, then her own fleet, and had gotten it through her mastery of persuasion.

_"Captain Sisko…what a surprise!" _she said, although her voice held an undercurrent of faux deviousness. She smiled broadly. _"You've shaved your head."_

"A long time ago," he confessed with a grin. "How are you doing?"

_"Not bad, not bad," _Sara nodded. _"I've decided that patrol duty in this part of space is the Starfleet equivalent of Purgatory. Perhaps I was a Dominion soldier in a former life, and now my past crimes are coming back to haunt me. I heard you got your station back."_

Sisko's beam started to falter. "Yes. But it sounds like we may lose it again if I don't get your help, Admiral. Things have suddenly taken a turn for the worse." He watched as the mirth vanished from Sara's eyes — they had been on a first-name basis for a long time, and she knew that if he called her 'admiral', even in front of his senior staff, then something had gone very, very wrong. _"I'm listening, Ben. What do you need."_

"As incredible as it sounds, we've confirmed that a passage has been opened from here to another reality. Our sensors detected that the Borg from this alternate reality are the likely culprits. I've contacted Admiral Roleman, but she can't give us reinforcements for another two weeks…and by then, our science officer expects that some kind of temporal convergence effect will combine our two universes into one."

Sara stared at him for a second, then shook her head. _"Damn. Have you got any hard evidence of this?"_

"An hour or so in the alternate universe. We recorded as much as we could. It looks like the Borg have built a platform to maintain the passageway's integrity. And…DS-Nine is being assimilated as we speak."

_"Send me everything you've got. I'll speak with Admiral Ross: I have a few favours I can pull in with him. How long until this…convergence takes place?"_

"Nine days or so."

_"I'll be there before then, you can guarantee it."_ She smiled reassuringly. _"Keep the home fires burning until we get there."_

"I will, Sara. Just try to be punctual."

_"Oh, we'll be there on time, alright. Ready to kick the Borg all the way back to their own reality. I'll contact you as soon as I've got permission to move out. Riverstone out."_

The holographic image vanished, then the eye-shaped frame filled with a wide view of the _Thunderchild_ on docking pylon two. Sisko nodded slowly. "Now that we have our reinforcements, we need to get a few things going. Constable, get that tactical report on my desk within the next six hours. Kira, get me the replicants and tell them we'll convene in the science lab. We've got a rescue operation to plan."

*                      *                      *


	14. Chapter 13

Ensign Connie Laraque awoke to the smell of death and darkness.

A profound feeling of disorientation overrode all her physical senses: her eyes were squeezed shut, she could hear nothing but silence, and the only thing her nose could tell her was that it was under an assault by the stink of dead flesh. Experimentally, she opened her eyes. _Nothing. Have I gone blind? _Blink, blink, and still the blackness was all she could see. She waved a hand in front of her face. Well, blindness or not, she was still alive. For now, that was all that mattered. Now, all she had to do was find a way out of here.

But where was here? Without her eyes, she had no idea where she was. Connie hauled herself up onto hands and knees and slowly started shuffling forward, just like she had in survival training at the Academy. It took a few seconds for her to get her bearings; eventually, though, she traced a perimeter around the space she was in. It was small, certainly, but definitely not equipment locker-sized. So…what was bigger than an equipment locker, yet smaller than, say, a hallway? She thought about that for a moment. _Shuttlecraft? Wait a second, we don't carry any shuttles. Maybe a runabout? Certainly not a turbolift carriage. Perhaps somebody's quarters? _The possibilities spun around and around in her head. Finally, she gave up trying to decide and went back to the vision concern. She knew that both eyes were intact (always a good sign, she thought). Shakily, Ensign Laraque managed to stand up, extending her palms to the nearest wall so she could feel her way along. _There's got to be a light switch around here somewhere, dammit. _Her questing fingers brushed over a small curve of transparent aluminium, and with a slight squeak of joy, realised that she had not gone blind after all — it was just that the lights were off. The panel flicked on after a moment's resistance. _Yes! _Now all she had to do was find the controls for the room lights…with an audible pop, a glowtube sputtered to life.

The room looked very much like a shuttlecraft cabin. Each bulkhead was arched inwards to give the ceiling a domed feel, and the hard metal and transparent aluminium walls were broken up with soft cushion-like pads and strips of carpet. Yes, this place was pre-war, without a doubt. Connie's engineering training was already picking up on specific technological features of the room. Banks of seating arranged tightly in two sections, each one equipped with a gravitic harness. She walked to the door at the front of the cabin, and even though it refused to open for her, it was obvious that some kind of cockpit lay beyond it. _So, Connie, what do you know? Crash couches, a sealed cockpit, and a small space…this is an escape ship. _It made perfect sense. And as she tried to flush the environmental reserves to get some fresh air, she wondered why she was inside an escape ship in the first place.

Memory resurfaced like a drowning man coming up for air. There had been an attack. Not a long, drawn-out battle, but a skirmish. It hadn't taken too long for the evacuation call, then…what? Reason dictated that she had tried to save as many lives as she could, then run to an escape pod and tried to get free. Then she turned, and saw the source of the smell: a man, lean to the point of gaunt and clutching a hypospray, was sprawled on the floor. Connie didn't need a medical kit to know that he was dead. The large crater of melted flesh on his back told her that straight off. He was an ensign as well, judging by the pips on his collar. She shook her head sadly and gingerly removed the man's jacket. Starfleet escape pods didn't come with sheets and morgues, but it would do.

Trying to be optimistic, though, Ensign Connie Laraque knew that every Starfleet escape pod had two hatches: one for standard ingress and egress, and an emergency door in case the lifeboat landed awkwardly. She didn't know if one or both were malfunctioning, but she had to find a way to escape from her two-bit prison.


	15. Chapter 14

For the second time in twenty-four hours, the _Defiant_, now flanked by the starships _Thunderchild_ and _Sarekar_, disappeared into the transdimensional wormhole. The two Akira-class ships were equipped with Starfleet's closest thing to a cloaking device, a warp signature suppression device that was coupled with various stealth technologies. It would not hold forever, but as long as they kept a low profile, the task force would be safe from detection. As soon as they emerged into the alternate reality, each vessel tightened up and went into silent running.

Captain Sisko had routed the fleet coordination screens to his command chair. He watched the pulsing status icons of the _Thunderchild_ and the _Sarekar_ for a second, then nodded in satisfaction. So far, their plan was working as expected. Now for the primary phase of the mission. "Plot a course to DS-Nine, warp one-point-five. Engage," he said, inputting the order into the fleet transmission data. The overpowered engines of the _Defiant_ rumbled a bit as they pushed them beyond light speed. 

"I've got a fix on the station," Lieutenant Dax said after a moment. "Beginning scans for life signs and evidence of Borg takeover."

The viewscreen buzzed and lazily put together a low-resolution image of the arching rings and pylons of _Deep Space Nine_. Apart from a handful of green glows from exposed hull, it appeared normal. Sisko watched carefully. He knew that it was probably assimilated now, functioning somehow in the Collective's plans. The cube was hanging around somewhere, and with its powerful multi-adaptive sensor matrices, it would probably uncover one of the _Defiant_'s flanks. And if _that_ happened, it was fight or flight for the task force. "Keep an eye out for any hostiles," he commented to Worf at Tactical I.

"No sign of the cube or spheres, sir," he replied. Everyone spoke in relatively hushed voices, as though the Borg could overhear them.

"Preliminary scans of DS-Nine are done, Benjamin." The voice of Dax distracted Sisko. "It looks like Borg penetration is extreme. The core has been modified entirely, and I'm guessing that most of the habitat ring is converted into drone barracks or something, judging by the subspace activity going on. The pylons and docking ring haven't really been touched. And no, I haven't detected any non-Borg life signs." She turned and looked at the rest of the crew. "But, we are at warp speed, and we're using passive scans. The distance doesn't help, either. Once we're in realspace, we're much more likely to detect any survivors."

Minutes later, the three Starfleet ships blurred out of subspace and took up a defensive posture to protect each other. The _Thunderchild_ trained its sensors on their aft quarter, and the _Sarekar_ watched the forward, while the _Defiant_ prepared to evacuate anyone on the station who hadn't been assimilated. Normally, this duty would have fallen to one of the larger vessels and their greater transporter capacity, but the _Defiant_ was smaller, faster, and more manoeuvrable. If they were detected, it had a greater chance of escaping. Jadzia watched her screens intently for a few seconds, then her shoulders tensed in excitement. "I've found non-Borg life signs! Fifteen…twenty…thirty…almost fifty. They're scattered through the station. Most of them are in clusters, but there are smaller groups of five or six holed up, and a few individuals wandering around."

The Kira-replicant snorted. "The large groups will be assimilation chambers. Victims lined up for the slaughter of their individuality. Start there."

Sisko nodded at Dax. "Begin transport protocols."

Jadzia had designed and built a complex software program for the beam-out operation. Cloaking technology limits meant that the _Defiant_ had to decloak, scoop up as many survivors as they could in as short a time as possible, then recloak and hopefully avoid being spotted. As an added precaution, the replicants had suggested that they fire RCS thrusters and change position in between transporter runs, just to boost their chances. With a few keystrokes, Dax had cued the program and took a breath. "Okay. Here goes…"

Lights on the bridge changed configuration as the Romulan cloaking device went into standby mode. They were now exposed. Sisko set his jaw and waited. _Damn. The transporters are taking too long. Malfunctions?_ The indicators on his panel told him that the two tiny transporter pads were working overtime to bring in survivors. He counted to ten as slowly as he could, then felt some of the tension slip as the program brought the cloak back into effect. There didn't seem to be any reactions from the station. Dax said, "First load is in. Only four to go," and let her program take over RCS functions. Tiny jets built into the hull fired in short bursts, moving them around while leaving a minimal trail. "It worked!" she sighed. Unconsciously, she had been holding her breath the whole time. "We're in position. Ready for second cycle." 

But before the cloaking field could fade, Sisko heard an eerie humming noise behind. He spun his chair and vaulted to his feet, facing three glittering columns of turquoise energy that coalesced into Borg drones. They stared impassively at him. "Damn!" he exclaimed, sensing that Worf was now on his feet. _This had been going too well._ He scrabbled for his hand phaser as the Borg advanced forwards. Worf squeezed off a shot that felled the closest drone, but his second scattered harmlessly over the adaptive shields. The drone was almost upon Sisko: he stepped backwards. The bright red laser of its ocular array was blinding as it made direct contact with his own eye. "Dax, beam them out of here!"

The Trill worked her control board frantically. "I can't! They've picked up our transporter frequency and blocked it out!" She pushed out of her own chair. "We've got more intruders in other critical sections!"

Failure. The _Defiant_ would soon be dismantled for useful technology, and the crew would serve the Collective as workers. Sisko tapped a button on the control board, and sighed in resignation as the bridge dissolved to blackness, then vanished to reveal the walls of a holosuite. The station computer's voice said _"Program complete," _in a pleasant tone.

He sagged against a wall. "What went wrong?"

Dax sat down, hugging her knees. "The Borg traced our transporter beam back to its origin point. They found the frequency and used it to slip a force onto the ship without us knowing." When the others looked at her, she added, "Their body shields were adapted against the transporters by then. It would have taken another few moments to reconfigure the emitters to beam them out. And even then, the drones we get rid of would be replaced by ten more."

Worf kicked a deck plate with one foot angrily. "So they adapt to everything we've tried?"

"Yes," said Jadzia sadly.

"What about countermeasures?" Kira suggested. "In the Resistance, we picked up a few low-tech ways of blocking transporter beams. The Cardassians were fond of these kinds of tactics."

"None of them would allow us to pick up survivors," Dax mentioned. "They piggyback an invasion force over the transporter beam, we get boarded, and our only option is to trigger an immediate self-destruct. There has to be a better way!"

The holosuite was silent for a moment, and the group seemed to share a feeling of immense frustration. Sisko wondered if the replicants felt like this every day of their lives, fighting an enemy that could instantly adapt to every single tactic, replace every lost soldier with ten more, and never ever stop coming. He let another breath go. Intervening in this conflict was suddenly becoming a very bad idea. But, despite the ambiguous guidelines Starfleet laid down regarding temporal disturbances and alternate realities, he knew that he could never condemn an entire quadrant to assimilation. After what the Borg had done to him and his family, there was no way he could let it happen to anyone else. "There is, old man," he said firmly. "And we're going to find it." Sisko started pacing the holosuite perimeter. "Perhaps we're looking at this from the wrong angle. We're trying to evacuate DS-Nine via transporters. What about shuttles, life pods? We need to remember that the station is under hostile control, so they've probably figured out how to use the weapon sails by now. Can we somehow get the survivors out another way? Or, what about neutralising Borg sensors so we have more time?"

"All fine suggestions, sir," O'Brien remarked. "but the _Defiant_ isn't built for these kinds of operations. We could hold our own for a while if it came to a shoot-out, sure. Somehow, though, I think the Borg would prefer to take our technology than destroy it." He wiped his hands on his uniform pants. Sisko knew that he had been pushing the engineer fairly hard over the past twelve hours, but they had to find a way to retake the alternate DS-Nine before the Borg could merge the two realities. The holosuite had been running without a break for hours on end.

While the chief of ops was taking a breather, the captain noticed that Colonel Kira was tapping away at the manual access console. The screen was lit up with variables taken from the simulation. She looked over at the group once as the data scrolled by. "I've done too many evacuations in my lifetime, especially over the Occupation. I've got a few tricks that might speed up the transporters: they're not exactly orthodox procedure, but…" she shrugged and pushed a few keys, then nodded satisfactorily. "If we can set up some auxiliary pattern buffers to carry the load, we can fit an extra few people on each load. It might speed everything up."

"Bearing in mind that we don't know if there are any survivors to rescue," Dax suggested. "Maybe we should prepare more for conflict with the cube rather than saving people who might not exist."

O'Brien wandered over to the console and watched Kira toying with the data. His eyebrows began to rise. He wasn't a stickler for regulations and order either, but some of the hypothetical configurations for the transporter were downright outlandish. "We haven't got the parts for that," he pointed out. "and the transporter room isn't big enough." She cast him a withering glare, and he wisely chose to shut up. With one final keystroke, the colonel highlighted one of her more viable suggestions and turned to Sisko.

"Sir, according to our scans, there's a debris field in between DS-Nine and the Denorios Belt, mostly made up of hull fragments and escape pods from the station. Back in the Occupation, we used to stage prison breaks using the warden transporter pads. But the problem with that was the Cardassians tracing the frequency back to our receiving point." Kira leaned on the console with a sigh. "So, we learned to bounce the pattern along a series of shunt points, each one in a different location. By the time the Cardassians realised what we were doing, we'd already beamed out hundreds of prisoners and had destroyed the transporter." 

Sisko nodded slowly. "But what can we use as shunt points?"

"Life boats," she said with a slight glint in her eye. "There are enough out there to link up in a network, and they already have built-in transporter buffers. All we need to do is get the access code uplinks and we have our own shunt points, set up and ready to run."

O'Brien nodded slowly. "I've gotta hand it to you," he said. "that didn't occur to me. And if we do a good job, we can hide somewhere else and not have to worry about being detected." 

"Which means the _Thunderchild_ and _Sarekar_ can handle some of the load," Dax added.

"This sounds like a plan." Sisko said. "Now, let's see what we can do."

Odo was secretly impressed with Colonel Kira's demonstration. He had remained largely silent during the holographic simulations, choosing to watch and decide if the proposals were viable security options or not, but even he hadn't remembered the old Bajoran tactic of shunt points. The Resistance fighters had converted some of DS-Nine's cargo transport pads to use as shunts, back when the station was called _Terok Nor_. How could he have forgotten? It just went to show that even Starfleet, with all it's fancy technology and well-trained engineers, often missed the obvious and simple solutions. Not that Odo minded Starfleet; it was an impressive feat of organisation that had held up over the course of the Dominion War. But they sometimes looked for the most complicated answer, rather than heading back to basics. Sometimes Odo thought _that_ was why he was here.

But despite the arrival of an effective rescue plan, he knew that their success would be short-lived. He had finally received the data packet from Starfleet Intelligence, and the conclusions that he was drawing were not very optimistic at all. As the senior officers filed out, he snagged Sisko's arm with one hand. The dark-skinned man turned and made eye contact with the changeling. "Yes, constable?"

"Captain, I've completed my tactical research, and I have to say that my initial results are not what we hoped for," Odo said, voice gravelly.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that the damage done during the recent Dominion withdrawal has reduced the station's defensive capacity." He shook his head a little. "I doubt that we can stand up to one Borg ship, let alone a fleet."

"Even with the weapon upgrades?" Sisko asked incredulously. Odo knew that he and the captain had campaigned for three years to get retrofits for _Deep Space Nine_'s weapon sails. They had finally boosted the defensive power of the space station to the point where they could repel a respectable fleet of Cardassian ships, but the combined might of the Dominion's warships and the Galor-class vessels had been too much. They had only recently managed to retake the station for a second time, and it was all too clear that Sisko didn't want to lose it again.

"Even with the upgrades. The evidence suggests that the Borg would survive because of their superior regenerative speed: they can patch up damage faster than we can. I don't know if we can alter our phasers and torpedo systems to compensate for that, but I'll keep looking into it," the changeling murmured. The silence in the holosuite was tangible.

Sisko nodded once. "Keep searching, Odo, because I don't want to be caught out if we can't close the passageway between now and then."

"As you wish," Odo replied, turning and leaving before Sisko could say another word.

*                      *                      *

With one last resilient flicker of effort, the bridge of the U.S.S. _Sarekar_ finally returned to its usual state of opacity. _Deep Space Nine's_ science officer had warned them about the passageway's curious effects on the photonic ratios of matter. Despite this, though, Captain T'Svara had not been entirely prepared for the visual disorientation. It was like the protective dome of bulkheads and viewscreen had vanished and left her open to the mercies of the emerald corridor. Even her supreme mastery over emotion could not stop the sudden sensation of falling. Both hands gripped the arms of the command chair with a strength fuelled by her fright. She had to restrain a spire of relief when the ship stopped quavering and normal space replaced the wisps of green energy. "Silent running, code grey," she said. Her voice was surprisingly deadpan, but her white knuckles betrayed the irrational fear lurking beneath the façade of control. "All sensors to passive sweeps. Report any suspicious readings to the Tactical station." T'Svara was renowned, in both her crew and certain circles of the Fleet, for being somewhat flexible in her allowances to illogic, but T'Svara had also faced the Borg before. It was her sound conclusion that there was no room for illogic in a fight with this particular enemy. Her clipped orders and no-nonsense demeanor were just signs of this attitude. "Transporter room one, this is the captain. Report on your status."

_"Lieutenant Forbes here, ma'am," _a pert, female voice replied. _"We've installed Commander Dax's retrieval program, and simulations are looking positive. We might actually pull this one off."_

T'Svara didn't move at all. "Your candour is appreciated, lieutenant, but your cynicism is not. Continue refining the operation. Computer, feed select data to my console, categorised under threat probability and scientific interest to the Federation." A screen on the right-hand side of her chair lit up with sporadic lines of information. One of the Vulcan's eyebrows arched. The first reading positively identified as Borg was a large structure near the mouth of the corridor: the _Defiant_ had first recorded it on their initial scout run. If it was, as they hypothesised, a machine designed to maintain the transdimensional wormhole's integrity, then it's destruction was a priority. She flagged the accompanying diagram for later review. A few more data screens flashed by before she got the analysis on the escape pod field. They came up on the terminal as a spray of white dots drifting thousands of kilometres from the violated DS-Nine. She looked at them and found that she had to hold back a pang of sadness. The occupants of the scarred lifeboats were either long dead or assimilated, but their treacherous prisons would now save at least a few lives. She flexed her fingers gently. "Transporter rooms, transmit the access codes on stealth frequencies. Retrieve feedback data and stand by to energise."

The Tactical console pinged, and a glowing line stretched from the _Sarekar_ to one of the white dots. Two, then three, four, five, and six pods, all joined up to their ship by silvery string, like a huge complex molecule floating in the ether. Each one of the lifeboats in the chain had responded to their access code request and had activated their escape transporters. With some clever manipulation, they were able to link the matter stream through each one until it got from the space station to the _Sarekar_, making the transporter frequency much harder to detect and trace. An officer nodded at her and mentioned that the _Defiant_ had deployed the signal. T'Svara nodded.

"Transporter rooms…energise."

Being cloaked, the _Defiant_ was unable to transport any survivors out from DS-Nine. But the two Akira-class ships could operate their own transporters in silent running, and so began remote sweeps of the station, using the closest escape pod as a baseline reading. The seconds ticked by onerously, until the Tactical office stabbed a control and reported, "I've found one life form. It's human. I've piped co-ordinates to Lieutenant Forbes.

_"Transporter room to bridge. We've locked onto the life form and started the transport cycle. It'll take a few moments, ma'am."_

T'Svara did not reply, but instead stared into her private screen. A blue dot had streaked off DS-Nine and was now making its way through the network of lifeboats. At each point in the chain, the transporter changed modulation and sent the matter towards another pod, until it finally ended up in the pattern buffers of the _Sarekar_. From there, Forbes would beam the life form directly to sickbay, so that any wounds could be treated. A moment later, the comm clicked and Forbes said, _"Got them! One human, female, now materialising in sickbay. She looks unharmed. Any sign of Borg activity?"_

"Negative, lieutenant, although we cannot be sure at this stage."

_"Warn us when you _are_ sure, because we're going to have to recalibrate bits and pieces so they don't track us. Forbes out."_

T'Svara mentally made a note to give Forbes a commendation for her duty, although her occasionally-pessimistic attitude made dealing with her difficult at times. She looked back to the Tactical officer, who shook his head at her. "We haven't found any more life signs, ma'am. Beginning second sweep." He worked his controls for a number of minutes before shaking his head again. "Negative on the second sweep. Shall I try a third?"

"No. Perhaps the _Thunderchild_ retrieved the others."

"Or perhaps there were no others."

It was an opinion that T'Svara did not particularly like, but she knew that it was probably true. All the hard work designing this operation, and there was one woman who needed saving. "Continue passive sweeps of the area. If you see the cube, notify me immediately. We can watch the _Thunderchild_ and _Defiant_ until they signal us." Her eyes remained fixed ahead of her.

"The _Defiant's_ signalling us, ma'am," the Tactical officer murmured after a moment, as though the Borg would overhear him. "Time to go."

In one smooth motion, T'Svara stoop up from her chair and moved towards the bridge viewscreen, eyes narrowed. This was it. This was the only other crucial moment in the entire retrieval plan. Both the _Thunderchild_ and the _Sarekar_ would hang back for exactly one minute while the _Defiant_ scampered into the shelter of Jeraddo, then diverge and take separate paths back to the passageway. The warship would then take passive scans from the darkness of the moon's shadow and analyse the transdimensional engine, collecting data that would form their plan of attack later. T'Svara doubted that such a plan would succeed without Starfleet assistance, but her role was not to destructively critique the strategies formulated for this mission. She had the sole survivor of the assimilated DS-Nine to get to safety. Right now, the only safety they knew was their own reality. She watched as the stars on the screen started crawling towards one side. They were on the way out: now all they had to do was avoid detection. The three ships were orbiting DS-Nine like moons, and although they were invisible now, she had a suspicion that they were around somewhere, watching them make their escape. T'Svara had decided that despite her logical (if not emotional) convictions, she would not panic. There was still the life of the human woman they had rescued to think about. It was disappointing that the rest of the station's crew had been killed or incorporated into the hive mind, but thinking about the loss would only induce more irrational reactions in both herself and the crew. No, she focused on the viewscreen. It would take an Akira-class ship such as the _Sarekar_ three minutes, fourteen seconds to reach the passageway at their safe speed under silent running. If they were ambushed, they could certainly tackle one or even both spheres, but she truly feared the —

"Borg cube! On an intercept course, bearing zero-zero-four mark nine!" the helmsman bellowed. His voice was dripping with panic. She couldn't blame him. "I think they're running hot, ma'am. Speed of one-hundred-fifty-three percent impulse."

T'Svara clenched her fists until the fingernails nearly pierced the skin. Her breathing remained constant as she tried to slow her triphammer heart. Emotion raged behind her eyes. "Maintain silent running," she rasped. 

"Aye, ma'am."

"They're intersecting our impulse trail," the Tactical lieutenant reported. "Average speed is dropping…I think they're analysing the ion stream. Wait…they're vectoring to follow us!"

The temperature of the bridge seemed to drop by a few degrees, which caused T'Svara to shiver violently. All she said was, "Maintain silent running." The screen changed to depict a giant leaden cube that was lumbering through space. She ground her teeth together. _Remain calm. Remember that your priority is to get home safely. _"Do not fire on them. Disable all sensors. Bridge to engineering: activate and lock the magnetic constrictors."

_"Acknowledged."_

"All sensors disengaged. Warp signature is undetectable," somebody said.

"Hostile now directly aft, following our impulse trail. Fifty-one thousand kilometres and closing. Fifty thousand. Forty-nine…"

"Have they detected the others?" T'Svara asked.

"Negative. Forty-two thousand…"

"Reconfigure the stealth systems. Dampen out the impulse drive."

"I'm trying, but they've almost got a fix on us."

"How long until we reach the passageway?"

"One minute, eighteen seconds. They'll catch us before we get there."

"Thirty-eight thousand and closing…"

T'Svara thought furiously. The Borg would punch through their stealth devices and lock onto them within seconds. So what would deter them? One lone vessel could hardly deal with a cube. She thought about altering course, but that would probably just allow them to catch up faster. The Denorios Belt was too far away, and heading to the shadow of Jeraddo would open the _Defiant_ to attack. There was no logical solution to this dilemma. Unless…she swivelled on one heel and stalked back to her chair screen. The network of escape pods was still on the display, blinking silently. "Ops," she said slowly. "We have a total complement of six shuttlecraft?"

"Yes, ma'am," the Ops ensign replied. "But…"

"Prepare one for launch, remote pilot only. No live passengers."

"Aye."

She sat down and desperately hoped that her plan would work. Logic dictated that the Borg would follow their set patterns and abort the chase if there was a more attractive target for assimilation. If they hadn't picked up the _Sarekar's_ warp engine yet, they might still have a chance at escape.

"Shuttle ready," said the Ops officer, a young man of Bolian descent.

"Launch."

"Shuttle is leaving our stealth field."

T'Svara nodded. "Increase power to its warp field. Blow the safety mechanisms if you have to."

"Done. Warp signature has doubled in strength…wait! The Borg are altering course! They're slowing down and scanning the shuttle! Thirty-two thousand kilometres distant and falling behind."

If the Vulcan had been prone to emotions, she would have sighed and fallen into her command chair. As it was, she merely bobbed her head once, walked to the helm, and fixed her steely eyes on the viewscreen. They were now only a little way from the transdimensional wormhole. The rescue mission had, against odds, succeeded.

*                      *                      *


	16. Chapter 15

"What the hell?"

The words had barely left her mouth when the room began to dissolve into a silvery glare. Connie Laraque had sat in the cramped escape pod for an hour before moving to the door and prising it open, giving her access to the control room: from there, she had spent an irritating forty-five minutes trying to open the blast shields on the porthole, just so she could figure out where she was in space. At that point, she had realised that this was an older-style lifeboat, one of the ex-starship models designed to be piloted manually, unlike the newer pods that were less of a ship in itself and more of a capsule that crashed on the nearest habitable planet. When the metal plates had finally fanned back into the hull, she had been greeted not by a spray of stars, but by darkness. _That_ had thrown her a little. She figured that maybe she had been unconscious until the pod had landed nose-first into the ground, but then she had turned on the forward spotlights, and they had shown her that the only thing in front of the cockpit was a duranium bulkhead. That was even more confusing. Had she been abducted by the Borg? If so, why hadn't she been assimilated? Or…she managed to coerce the control panels into giving her a status check on the docking clamps, and found that they were still in place. So…the escape pod had never left DS-Nine. Which meant that she was possibly the last to leave. Which meant that the station was now under Borg control. Which meant they could be coming soon. Her hands froze just above the controls that would release the clamps: doing so would have dropped the pod belly-first into the bottom of the cavity, damaging her refuge and possibly alerting her captors. And that was when the transporter beam took a hold on her.

After what felt like an eternity, she rematerialised in a well-lit room that was bigger than the entire escape pod itself. She was lying on her back. A large array of lights was positioned over her, part of the ceiling but also serving some kind of purpose. The whole room looked as though it was built before the war, judging by its generally-cushy décor. But one thing that struck her was the general silence. There were no moaning injured…then, a man in a grey-shouldered, blue-collared uniform leant over her with an instrument in hand. "Multiple lacerations, but nothing dreadful," he pronounced. He was British. "How do you feel?"

_This is too good to be true._ A Federation sickbay that was clean, bright, comfortable, and lacking any patients other than her? There wasn't a ship in the fleet that was this good. And there was no morgue. No groaning officers lying on beds with Borg technology sprouting from their bodies, no charred carpets, no collapsed ceilings, no broken displays, no dim lights, and no chaos. It was like a dream. The doctor asked her again, "How do you feel?" as she sat up. The bed was gloriously comfortable and padded with thick material. No beds on DS-Nine had been that nice to lie on.

"It's…it's all a trick, right?" she asked uncertainly. "Where are the holoprojectors? The switches to…" Connie reached out and brushed the bed, then the man's sleeve, tentatively, as if he would vanish in a puff of smoke if she pressed too hard. The doctor hesitated, then snapped open a medical tricorder and started scanning her. She looked in wonder at the tricorder — even it wasn't scarred or broken with overuse. It looked as good as it would have the day it was replicated. "It's all real? This is a Federation ship…?"

"Yes, the _Sarekar_, but how do you feel, ensign? Is there any pain?"

She touched her ensign's pip wistfully. "N-no, I'm okay. But…I'm Ensign Connie Laraque, _Deep Space Nine_. I haven't heard of this ship, and quite frankly, never seen one this clean before."

The doctor placed his instruments back on a trolley. They were all so neat and tidy…there was no place for chaos here. "There's a lot to explain, Ensign Laraque. For now, though, you need to rest. You've been through quite an ordeal."

"Rest? You mean, you don't need me on urgent duty? I mean, I'm fit to work."

"The _Sarekar_ has a full crew complement, ensign." The doctor sounded confused.

A full complement…every ship in the fleet was always short of crew. No exceptions. It was one of the downsides of fighting an enemy that turned your men into theirs. Sure, new vessels started out with a complete crew, but then they would cut their teeth on their first space battle, and then every person would be filling in for someone else, and the engineers would be rigging up terminals to autonomously handle the load that used to be done by So-and-So, who had been captured three weeks previously. Connie slowly reclined again and closed her eyes as the lights dimmed noticeably. It was like she had died and gone to engineering heaven. Had she? She didn't know, and frankly, she couldn't care less. She had been taken from the clutches of the Borg, and she'd be damned if she would head back there again.

"Alright," she admitted finally, eyes closed. "This makes no sense. _Deep Space Nine_ was assimilated, and I'm scooped up by the only Starfleet ship in the galaxy with a full crew complement and an empty sickbay? No. No way is that possible. Either I'm dead, or the Borg have captured me and somehow want to torture me in a holographic nirvana, or…or something _really_ screwy is going on here."

But the doctor was gone. Connie cracked open an eyelid and saw that he had retreated to his office, dampening the lights for her comfort. Comfort? Hell, that had been a dirty word on DS-Nine. If you wanted to hang on to your individuality, you gave up your comfort for the good of others, no questions asked. She closed her eye again. But she found that she could not rest. Strange, considering that she had not completely relaxed in her four years of duty. She finally had found a comfortable bed, yet she could not sleep in it. _Old habits die hard, _she reminded herself as she quietly eased off the biobed and crept towards the large double-doors of the sickbay. Whatever this place was, it looked just like the old starships they used to build before the war started. The doors didn't even have the big security locks on them. Connie stopped just before the hatch had a chance to whoosh open for her. The doctor would undoubtedly hear the noise. She didn't know, but something just wasn't right about him. For one, he was wearing an outdated Starfleet uniform, including the old comm badges. And he was too clean. _And_ he didn't have the harried looks that everyone possessed in her world. Something was just not right about this gilded cage of hers.

Laraque turned and went to the side of one bulkhead. Sure enough, there was a Jefferies tube access panel. It whispered open with a little more noise than the main doors, but not enough to bother the doctor, who was deeply engrossed in some information on a padd. Connie slithered into the tube and closed the hatch behind her. She could access every ship system from here. It was just a matter of making her way to a diagnostic console and checking the _real_ specs for the _Sarekar_. Something told her that she would find a completely different ship.

She did find a diagnostic screen a few metres down the tunnel. It blinked to life at her touch (another unusual characteristic), and she dialled up the general EPS conduit layout. To her surprise, she found a familiar-looking design rotating slowly on the screen before her, albeit with a few odds and ends that she hadn't seen before. There were allowances to science labs and other non-tactical systems that just weren't seen on starships anymore. The conduits around the weapons and shielding systems were pretty standard as well. An overlay hovered above the layout of the EPS, and Connie realised that she was on an Akira-class ship. The Akira was a good class of vessel, she held, but they were only being produced in limited numbers. The Borg had taken the Utopia Planitia shipyards a long time ago, so parts and construction facilities were becoming increasingly hard to come by. She accessed external visuals and scrolled around the various images of the broad white hull. They weren't in normal space, but in some form of nebula: a chaotic flow of green energy roared by, bouncing off the shields and surrounding the entire vessel.

Then the Jefferies tube disappeared around her.

Connie screamed. _This isn't happening!_

Diagnostic console 114-B2 still sat impassively before her, but now the hull outside was flickering under a web of emerald strands, and the rest of the tube she was in had vanished. She could feel the padded floor under her legs, but she was floating in space. She opened her eyes for a second and realised that they weren't in a nebula, but a wormhole of some form. The whole ship appeared to be phasing in and out of visibility, and it was scaring the hell out of her. She screamed again. Her voice echoed loudly in the enclosed space, reminding her that she was still inside a metal enclosure and still breathing, and she hadn't been sucked out, so therefore she was still inside. It was just that the wormhole had a very curious effect on optical perception. She focused on that thought until the tunnel gradually replaced her outside view of the universe.

"Computer, what just happened?" she asked. 

_"Irradiation of unknown particles from the temporal passage caused photonic rebound ratios to become unbalanced," _the pleasant voice of the computer replied. At least it was the same voice that she was used to.

The diagnostic screen suddenly changed angle, and the _Sarekar_ was catapulted back into normal space. Connie watched as it shot into warp towards…towards a familiar spider-like construct that hung in the middle of space. "_Deep Space Nine_ is here?" she murmured to herself. "And it's not assimilated?"

"What the _hell_ is going on around here?"

While the voyage of the _Sarekar_ had been a success, the crew of the _Defiant_ were not having as much luck. Almost ten minutes had passed since the two Akira-class vessels had made a break for the passageway. The tension on the bridge was almost palpable to the point where the very air seemed to be spread around them like a blanket. Jadzia Dax forced herself to take slow, deep breaths, then focused on her screens. She had taken them into the shadow of Jeraddo, an M-class moon of Bajor that had, in her reality, been extensively mined for resources to support the flagging Bajoran economy. It seemed as though the Bajorans here had not been allowed that opportunity. The mottled green orb served as a barrier that shielded them from the Borg sensors for now. However, that wasn't an absolute guarantee. The _Defiant_ had a cloaking device, but the _Defiant_ also had an overpowered warp core. It generated enough power to run ships several times larger than the comparatively-small warship, and that made it much easier to detect, even with a Romulan cloaking field that shrouded them from long-range scans. Dax figured that if they waited a while in the frozen cradle of Jeraddo, they could shake Borg suspicion and head for the passageway before they could be attacked. Or, at least, that was her theory.

Problem was, the Borg were looking _very_ inquisitive at this point. They had seen something very interesting. Dax watched as a sphere blinked up on her Ops monitor and began a standard search plot. It was so far constricting itself to the space around DS-Nine, but if it strayed too far in their direction, they would be discovered, and then there would be nothing left but to fight. The _Defiant_ was fast, but Borg ships were faster. She started to slow her breathing again and wiped some sweat off her brow. What was happening? She had faced far more deadly threats than the Borg before, such as the Dominion. But what she hated was the uncertainty. For a race that adhered to a central goal of advancement, the Borg could be pretty damn illogical and unpredictable. Dax wondered if she would still be an individual at this time the next day.

"One sphere is running a search pattern, sir," she said between breaths. 

"Anywhere near us?" Sisko asked in return.

"Not yet. I can't tell too much with passive scans, but I'll see what comes up in the next sweep. We're all anxious to get out of here, Benjamin, and I'll make sure we do." That was what he wanted to hear. A can-do attitude and an optimism that lay in hope. Dax just wanted to know if they would survive the next hour of their lives.

Her eyes began to hurt from staring at her control boards, so she gave herself a break and looked at the viewscreen. The last time she had seen Jeraddo, it had been a dull grey moon with patches of vivid molten rock where the mines had cut into the surface, but now it was a lush green sphere with a small sea stretching over the horizon point. Their first scan had shown no humanoid life signs. Perhaps the resistance movement had an automated outpost or something? She didn't really know, and right at this moment, she didn't care too much. Her entire mindset was orbiting around the Borg ship that was working it's way outwards towards their position. _Benjamin's probably panicking right now, _she reflected, but a quick glance at the reflection in her panels showed his impassive face set like stone towards the screen. _Yep, and he's still good at hiding it. _Dax turned her attention to the grey blob of the sphere on her readouts and tried to bury the fear. Now that she thought about it, the tiny image was less of a sphere than…than a metallic leaden ball on a string, or an antiquated clock pendulum, swinging around the central hub of _Deep Space Nine_ in a constantly-widening orbit. Yes. Now that she saw it that way, it didn't seem so bad. She forced a little smile on herself and settled back in her chair. It felt oddly uncomfortable, even though it was well-padded, albeit slightly less so than other Starfleet vessels. And the air on the bridge was stifling. She was sure the environmental systems were set to conserve power, so in practice, the bridge should be a lot cooler than this. She and Chief O'Brien had reconfigured the EPS distribution so that the skin of the _Defiant_ would be exactly as cold as the space around it, and when her eyes flicked to the thermal gauge, she saw that it was still so. She also noted that only twelve seconds had elapsed since she last checked the chronometer. Time wasn't meant to move _this_ slowly. Perhaps it was an after-effect of the passageway's bizarre temporal properties…she allowed her mind to submerge in these details, and soon she had let her attention wander sufficiently to miss a blip on her screen. It was then accompanied by a triple beep noise to make sure she saw it. 

The sphere. It had stopped it's search pattern and was now heading towards Jeraddo.

Towards _them_.

"We've got company," she announced abruptly. "Borg sphere on an intercept course."

Somewhere behind her, Captain Sisko stirred like a stone man coming alive. "How can they see us?"

"I'm not sure. Cloak and all stealth systems are running normally."

Colonel Kira pounced on her Tactical controls. "Captain, we've got our first readings, and it looks like they're coming in hot. Raise shields?"

He waited. "Not yet. Perhaps they'll miss us again."

Dax noted that all the heat was gone. She shivered once. "Sphere now one million kilometres and closing. They _must_ be able to see us."

"Sir," Worf rumbled from his chair. "if the Borg fire on us while the shields are down, they might disable weapons or another vital system. We should engage them now, while we still have the advantage!" He clearly disapproved of waiting, and Dax knew that the Klingon had encountered the Borg several times before. This would be a chance for even more payback. "Captain! We must raise shields now if we are to avoid damage!"

"Sphere now five hundred thousand kilometres and closing," Jadzia tossed in.

Sisko did not move. "Hold position."

"Captain!" Worf exclaimed, exasperated.

"Belay that, Mister Worf, or I'll have you escorted from the bridge."

"Four hundred thousand kilometres."

Now Kira wheeled around. "Hostile will be in weapons range in fifteen seconds. Sir…"

"Hold position."

Dax felt that she should say something, and every fibre of her being longed to fire up the _Defiant_'s engines and fly them away. But she knew Benjamin Lafayette Sisko, and she trusted him with her life. He had lost his wife and crew to the Borg once before. This was his opportunity for revenge. The only thing was, she didn't know if it was right to let him have that kind of power. She sat, torn, for five more seconds before turning around. "Captain, the Borg cube is out of sensor range, but they can be here before we escape. Is combat wise?"

"At this stage, Dax," Sisko said calmly. "it looks to be the best thing."

"The best thing?" she echoed. "Okay, Ben, don't go nuts on us now. Please." Her voice was even and serious. "Don't you remember the fight with the Borg? We can take the sphere, but the cube will outgun us a million to one…" She stopped, and her console chirruped again. "We're being scanned," she reported. Then, quietly, to herself, she added, "I guess there's no way out now."

"Shields ready," Worf suggested.

There was a moment of silence that was punctuated by the warning bleeps. The sphere lay inert in space. Dax pressed her teeth together and felt her toes tighten in her boots. It was right there, less than five hundred kilometres away! At that kind of proximity, it was a wonder that the _Defiant_ wasn't lighting up like a neon glowtube on their sensor screens. But there it hovered, unmoving, unwilling to reveal itself. It had defensive screens up, and while they were powerful and multi-adaptive, Dax was keenly aware that, at this range, the _Defiant_'s pulse phasers could tear the sphere apart. They just needed one second of surprise. 

"Remodulate phasers to the upper EM band," Sisko ordered, and Jadzia sighed in relief. "On my command, Worf, I want the shields up and cloak down. Fire on my mark."

The Klingon tapped his controls and grinned fiercely.

"Ready…mark!"

A thousand things happened at once. The bridge lighting went from non-existent to dim, and accompanying this was the hum of fresh plasma surging through the EPS conduits. That meant that the cloaking device was down. A nanosecond after the cloaking field had dissipated, Worf had the powerful shield envelope forming around them. Lastly, Kira stabbed her controls, and the _Defiant_ opened up with all the fires of hell. A stream of succinct phaser fire linked the Starfleet vessel and the leaden sphere in space. But the golden pulses of light splashed harmlessly over the Borg shielding; Sisko pushed himself upright as their opponent returned fire. The _Defiant_ rocked.

"Retune phasers, fire again!" he shouted.

Kira complied, and the sphere was assaulted with a blast of nadion energy that rippled violently against the invisible barrier between the two ships. The bridge crew noted with satisfaction that Kira's modifications had struck much closer to their target. She began toying with new phaser frequencies when a ray of sickly-green power struck the _Defiant_ once, twice, thrice. Something below decks rumbled unsettlingly. "They've punched through our shields!" Worf called out unnecessarily. "Modifying nutation: I'll try bolstering them with auxiliary power."

A bloom of fire broke out across the surface of the sphere. "I've broken through, continuing fire," Kira said. "Captain, suggest we get moving. The cube can't be too far away."

Sisko bobbed his head once and walked closer to the viewscreen, placing one hand on Dax's shoulder. She wasn't sure whether he was trying to comfort her, or deriving comfort from her stability. It didn't seem to matter at this point: she felt that it was a little of both. His touch was cool on her collarbone. "Evasive manoeuvres. Keep us in the moon's shadow. If we come under heavy fire, I want you to take us into one of the magnetic poles — it might scramble their sensors and buy us some time." The deck trembled until Dax put the ship into a lurching spin. The inertial dampeners were obviously a little sluggish. She kicked the impulse drive once or twice until the feeling of movement became little more than a notion. She knew that the _Defiant_ had a fair bit of grunt and agility, moreso than their enemy, but she was also aware that they couldn't go on forever in combat, especially since the cube could arrive any minute. 

"Direct hit!" Kira shouted as the sphere seemed to list slightly, as much as a geometrically-symmetrical object can list. "I think we knocked something out."

"Again!" Sisko replied.

A geyser of white-hot plasma spouted from a rupture in the hull. This seemed too easy. 

"Again!"

A cobalt-blue quantum torpedo managed to slip through the sphere's shielding, and it ignited inside the vessel, spreading fractures along the hull and blowing some of it clear from the superstructure. Dax shook her head slightly. _Way_ too easy. Borg vessels were renowned for their near-invincibility. This sphere was only a little smaller than the _Defiant_, and while spheres (and all other Borg ships) came in varying sizes for each 'class', the Starfleet craft had only suffered minor damage. She didn't feel vindicated at all as the sphere began to pirouette down towards Jeraddo's surface, caught in the gravity well and unable to escape the frozen fingers of the moon. Something was definitely amiss. 

"They're self-destructing," Worf announced.

Then the doors to the bridge hissed open.

Everyone turned.


	17. Chapter 16

"This is wrong, Worf! It's so, so wrong!"

An insolent echo bounced off the walls of one of the _Defiant_'s guest cabins, and the Dax-replicant (who was once again back in her own reality) pushed herself off the bunk. Their argument had been going on for the past hour, but was now reaching shouting proportions, her pent-up fury resonating inside the small space like antimatter burning inside a warp core reaction chamber. Her eyes, normally passive and grey like the ocean on a cloudy day, flared with anger against the unyielding wall of Klingon in front of her. He tried to lay a scarred, brawny hand on her back, but she tossed it off with a violent jerk of her arm. "Don't touch me. This is…it's…" she sighed as her reason began to take over again. "I don't know what it is. But we shouldn't do this. It's just not fair! They rescued us, brought us back to health, gave us showers and food, took us at our word. At our word, Worf! How long has it been since someone actually believed a tale like that? I can't remember. We're just exploiting them. We're as bad as the Borg if we do this!"

The Worf-replicant wheeled around, and his face was a mask of anger that made her jump a little. Pure Klingon aggression. "If we hesitate, we will lose the war," he said, simply and quietly, then he turned and kept working on the console. "If we lose the war, we will be assimilated. Is that what you want?"

"No!"

"Then co-operate."

"No!" The Dax-replicant stamped her foot to illustrate her point. "Have you been fighting for so long that you've forgot how it feels to be cared for? How it feels to be believed? This Benjamin was willing to take us in and help us, even if Starfleet wasn't! And you want to repay that with _this?_ It's insane and it's twisted and it just _isn't fair_, Worf!" Now her eyes were wet and red; she wiped the tears away with a sleeve, not allowing herself to cry just yet. "I'm going to tell them. I'll call a security team on the ship's intercom and they'll throw you in the brig." She turned and tapped her comm badge.

"Dax, no!" The Kira-replicant stepped in. She had been lying on a bunk, toying with her hand phaser's settings, but now she felt obligated to say something. The Bajoran went to the Dax-replicant and took hold of her arms, gently but firmly. "Jadzia, listen to me. Jadzia!" The Trill looked at her through tear-stained eyes. "I know, I know, it's not fair. But our lives aren't fair. We've fought since we were old enough to aim a phaser, and we're still fighting. This is a chance that we won't get again. This is a chance to end it all! We can be free and peaceful like the replicants, and we'll never have to see another drone in our lives. We can't pass that up, Jadzia, not now, not ever. You have to understand! It isn't fair, and if there was any other way, we would do it. The replicants have helped us _so_ much, and we are going to be forever in debt to them for that, but they've also given us an opportunity to bring this whole wretched war to an end, once and for all." She blinked and found tears in her own eyes. _Prophets, how long has it been since I've cried? _They seemed almost foreign to her. Death had become an everyday occurrence, loss as common as taking a breath. But Dax was hurting, and Dax had genuine sympathy for the replicants and their stable universe. Kira felt the same way, but she also felt a purpose that had to be accomplished.

"Damn it, Jadzia, now you've made me go all teary-eyed," she grinned. But the smile gave way to sadness after a moment. "We'll make it quick. Then they can go home, and our war will be over."

The Dax-replicant tried to smile in return, but couldn't, and started wiping the tears away. "Promise me that we won't hurt them," she whispered shakily. "We can't hurt any of them, especially Benjamin. I would die a hundred times over to save him again, Nerys, and I'll do that for him now." 

The Kira-replicant nodded. "I promise. Let's do it."


	18. Chapter 17

Colonel Kira Nerys turned in her chair and saw herself enter the cramped bridge of the _Defiant_. It was the replicant of herself from the mirror universe, still in her rust-red uniform that was almost exactly the same as her own, except for one or two minor things that were almost impossible to note. Her eyes were steely and cold. Kira let the seat return to the console and focused on her readings. The sphere they had been forced to attack was now little more than a flaming wreck on the surface of Jeraddo. However, she had the awful suspicion that the cube would be only minutes away. She heard Sisko's voice behind her, talking to the replicant, but it was irrelevant for the time being. She had to concentrate.

"I'm sorry, but this is a combat situation," Sisko was saying tersely. "You'll have to leave the bridge. Now. Return to your quarters."

When Kira didn't hear the usual pneumatic noise of the doors opening, she looked over her shoulder. The replicant was still standing there, one hand on the phaser at her hip. "But captain, we can help," she asked imploringly. "The _Defiant_ is powerful, but you've never fought the Borg here, in our own reality."

Sisko seemed ready to say 'no', but he shook his head and gestured towards the back. "Alright, fine. The mission ops table is free."

"Thank-you, captain," the Kira-replicant said, relief in her voice. But was it a little too much relief? Kira watched her duplicate walk to the mission ops table and seat herself at it, where she called up a screen of information and started reading. 

Chief O'Brien gazed into the spherical warp core reaction chamber as if he could see his future in the harsh white glare. He had felt the deck shake a few minutes ago, but nothing had happened since, so he assumed that it had been a sortie with one of the Borg vessels. Captain Sisko had obviously steered them clear of it, on the account that he was still fully biological, and the _Defiant_ was still throbbing with its overpowered gusto. "Woodward," he called to one of his assistants. "Check the EM ratios and make sure they're balanced. The last thing we need is for…"

A set of double-doors opened behind him, and he turned to see the powerful figure of Worf striding into the Engineering chamber. He looked a little beaten and bruised, but nonetheless okay. "Something I can do for you, commander?" Miles O'Brien asked, his Irish accent tinging the question.

Worf looked momentarily confused, then his expression cleared to its usual mix of seriousness and dour Klingon purpose. "Yes, Chief. The captain wanted me to look the phaser banks over one more time. We had to retune them for combat, and I am concerned that it may be causing wear on the mechanism."

O'Brien, being the chief engineer of both Starfleet's only cloakable warship and Cardassian space station, couldn't see how retuning the phasers would damage them, and he proceeded to tell Worf so. But the Klingon lieutenant was adamant. "It is a matter of safety," he insisted in a deep voice. "If we lose phasers whilst we are engaging the Borg, we would be captured and assimilated for certain. I only wish a few minutes to inspect the phaser banks, then I will return to the bridge." When O'Brien opened his mouth to protest, Worf cut him off. "We may only have minutes before the cube finds us, Chief. And I realise that your engineers are busy."

"Oh, alright," O'Brien gave in. He had known Worf for ten years, and trusted him to look over the ship's weapons array. "You can get through the security check by yourself, yes?" When the Klingon nodded, he waved a hand impatiently. "Well, get going, or the cube will find us." He said that last bit in a deep voice that mocked Worf's own bass timbre. The only response he got was a cutting glance before the lieutenant turned his back and left. O'Brien shrugged and got back to work.

Alone in the guest quarters, the parallel-universe Jadzia Dax tried to hold back the guilt behind a dam of control as she worked the control panel. It was a basic library access terminal that was available for guests to download and read non-classified information about the _Defiant_. In her own reality, starship designers never would have spared such a thought for temporary passengers. It would have been considered a waste of materials and computer usage. But Dax was a lot more computer-savvy than she let on around most people. She didn't like to flaunt it, but many hailed her as one of the Alliance's most accomplished hackers; she had cut her teeth on Borg security programs, and from there, she had found others to be a fair bit simpler. And she was already intimately-familiar with the computer firewalls of the _Defiant_. Sure, there were one or two differences here and there, but it was essentially the same system. The best way to do this was to focus entirely on the job. Forget about Benjamin. Forget that she was betraying him and his crew, his ship…

_Forget about it all. There's a way to get this done. Let's do it, _the age-old symbiont inside her commanded. The Dax symbiont was just as compassionate and hard-headed as the more humanoid Jadzia, but was endowed with several lifetimes of experience, and it knew that this was the only way for things to be done.

She proceeded to tunnel through the firewall using a combination of mathematic brute force and some clever tricks with access codes that she'd learned a long time ago. It took her only five or six minutes to get behind the security screens and into the core processing functions lists. The helm and navigation systems…that was her target. They were currently active and being manipulated from the bridge, but that just meant that the Dax-replicant had to be careful in the way she did things. Presumably, there was somebody sitting at the console, and that meant that any changes in the software were instantly obvious if she inadvertently let it be seen. She called up the _Defiant_'s astrogation library, found the appropriate star chart, and compared it with the recent passive scans. _Perfect, _she realised, relieved. This was going to be easy. One or two quick adjustments to the helm's course, a set-up sensor loop that would feed the screens false data, and an override protection switch. The Dax-replicant drew a sharp breath as she started to back out through the firewall, delicately, so as not to leave tracks. She had just betrayed Captain Sisko! Perhaps she could stop her hacks from coming into effect? Or confess and turn herself in?

No, that would get them nowhere.

She cleared the temporary memory bank, sent the signal, and shut the terminal down. If this all worked the way it should, she would have time to regret it later.


	19. Chapter 18

On the bridge, the Kira-replicant saw a tiny orange light blink on in the top-left corner of her screen. _Dax is finished_, she realised, and she called up the appropriate interface data on the console in front of her. This was the critical moment: Dax had altered the ship's course, and hopefully Worf had made himself useful and rigged up the cloaking device. Now all she had to do was set the terminal network connections and hope for the best. She touched the keypad, nodded once to herself, and laid her right hand on the holstered hand phaser at her waist. That was only there if one of the parallel-universe crewmen decided to jump her. It was a violent option, but she had been born into a violent reality, and things had come too far now to be shut down like this. 

The effects of their combined handiwork began to become obvious after a moment or two. More and more of the viewscreen became absorbed in the blackness of space as Jeraddo slid to one side, and she watched Dax note the slight drift, tried to compensate. But the hacked modifications should have taken care of that. And they had. The Dax at the helm looked over her shoulder at Captain Sisko. "Ben, we're drifting off-course and the helm's not responding."

Kira tried not to look guilty. 

"Computer, run a level five diagnostic on the helm controls," Sisko said.

_"Diagnostic complete. No errors to report."_

"Is it a viewscreen malfunction?"

Jadzia looked down at the screens and shook her head. "All sensor nodes are operating normally. It's not overly serious, in that we're still in the shadow of the moon, but…we've almost completed a full circle. Shall I shut down the thruster array?"

Sisko paused for a second. "Yes."

The Trill tapped her controls. "Thrusters not responding to commands. Bridge to engineering. We've got a problem up here."

_"What is it?" _the disembodied-yet-impatient voice of Chief O'Brien asked.

"Helm, navigation, and propulsion have all been locked down."

_"Nonsense! All diagnostic results show…"_

Dax rolled her eyes. "Then the diagnostics must be wrong, because the ship just turned itself around." A blinking indicator on the helm screens caught her eye. "I…that's interesting. The thrusters just went back to standby mode."

_Three…two…one…_the Kira-replicant thought slowly.

_"Bloody hell! The cloaking device switched itself on!" _O'Brien cursed. The lights on the bridge winked out and consoles brightened. Dax looked down at her controls, not touching anything, as though the _Defiant_ might bite her if she tried. Sisko got up from his chair and paced to the helm, but before he could get there, the voice of the computer said, _"Warning: unauthorised modifications to cloaking device. Cloaking field is destabilising."_ The captain frowned and waved to Dax. "Shut everything down! Take main power off-line."

"Nothing's responding!"

_"Cloaking field instability at nineteen percent," _the computer droned.

"O'Brien! Shut it down! Now!"

_"I'm trying, sir, but there's some kind of override in effect! I can't even get a peep out of her! I could manually take the warp core off-line, but…"_

"Chief, if we keep going like this, we'll be discovered. Switch to backups and override the main systems before…"

Too late. Stars blurred on the screen, and the _Defiant_ tore into subspace like a demon out of hell. Sisko sat back in his hair and watched as his ship slowly wrested its will back from the crew controlling it. He half-expected something else to happen, but fortunately, the _Defiant_ settled into warp seven and shot out of the Bajoran system. The only problem now was how to get home. "Belay that, Chief," he said wearily. Forcing any warp core off-line without safeties while in faster-than-light speed was a suicidal exercise in itself, but with the four-lobed monster throbbing away in the engine room, it would have spread a trail of destruction across billions of kilometres. The _Defiant_ had brought them home safely before, and the crew could now only hope that it would do so again, even in its possessed state. "Starships don't just start controlling themselves. If I were a suspicious person, I'd say that we've got a saboteur aboard."

_Damn, he's quicker than I remember,_ the Kira-replicant chided herself.

Sisko frowned deeply. "Computer, begin a level-three anti-infiltration diagnostic on all computer functions. Trace unauthorised computer access and report to my console only, silent alert. Confirm identification through fingerprint scan for results."

_"Acknowledged. Beginning level-three automated anti-infiltration diagnostic."_

The _Defiant_'s computer systems weren't the most advanced in Starfleet by far, but there was still a chance that the Dax-replicant's hacking efforts would be picked up by an automated search. The Kira-replicant settled back onto the uncomfortable stool and watched the dark-skinned human sit and wait. That was one of the things that distinguished him from his deceased counterpart. The Captain Sisko she knew had been constantly on his feet, pacing and making suggestions and always _moving_. He had been one of the lucky few who had raised a stable family within the unstable confines of the Federation as it collapsed around them: Jennifer Sisko was a research officer, and his son Jake worked with his mother on low-security issues. Of course, the term 'low-security issues' was becoming obsolete as the Borg slowly nibbled away at the borders of the Alliance. But it had been one of the few things that had remained solid after the takeover of Earth. Ben Sisko had sworn that even if the whole universe came crashing down, he'd put his family above his career, and he had. But then Ben Sisko had been ambushed as he tried to defend his outpost. The Kira-replicant sat for a moment and wondered how many Borg the tenacious captain would have taken down before he had succumbed to the metallic limbs and nanoprobes. _Without a weapon? Four, maybe five, _she concluded. He had trained himself in some kind of hand-to-hand combat, like most officers did now that the effectiveness of phasers was a subjective matter. She had watched him working out once or twice, and realised that his roundhouse kick would be enough to snap the necks of most humanoids, including all but the strongest of tactical drones. But that hadn't been able to save him, else he would be standing with her now. One more officer who was either dead or working for the enemy. 

"Dax, show me our trajectory on the viewscreen," Sisko said, snapping the Kira-replicant out of her reverie.

The Trill complied without replying. A small representation of the _Defiant_ blinked into existence on the curved wall screen, hovering over a grid that was scrolling beneath it. A green line appeared at the nose of the starship and shot ahead of it. "I'm running it against our own star charts," Lieutenant Dax said over her shoulder. "If things aren't too different in this reality, I might find an intersection point."

The Kira-replicant shook her head once, minutely, so that no-one else could see. When one had been fighting a war against a race of computerised humanoids, one learned to make one's plans not quite so obvious as that. If the Dax-replicant was half the hacker she seemed to be, she would have plotted a course that would take them somewhere inconspicuous, then change course again, and perhaps even a third time, before she would bring them to their destination. Her suspicions were confirmed when Dax informed them that they would not arrive near any planets on their charts. The Kira-replicant had worked with her colleagues to figure out a safe way to their journey's eventual conclusion. They would arrive in a dark nebula, change course, go back into warp, stop in the shadow of the desolate class-T planetoid of Beta Myamid, change course a second time, and go for the last thirty minutes before coming out of warp for the final time. 

"O'Brien, this is Sisko. Is the cloak still functional?"

_"Aye, captain, but there's some kind of…device clamped to the generator. It's emitting some background chroniton radiation. I don't know how it's affecting us. We seem to still be underneath Borg radar, though, so I'm not game to touch it until we're in a safer position. Are we still hurtling into the unknown?"_

"Unfortunately, yes. It appears that someone hacked into the computer core and toyed with our helm and navigation protocols." Sisko paused, and then he said something that the Kira-replicant hadn't been expecting. "We've tried a soft reset of the computer, and that was already locked out. What if we do a hard reset?"

They hadn't thought about that. Performing a hard reset on the computer core would result in a shipwide loss of all non-vital systems. The secondary processor could handle the handful of essentials — life support, limited tactical functions, and a few other functions — but everything else would be interrupted. The Kira-replicant hadn't checked if the cloaking device would lose control if they did a hard reset, but she figured that it probably would. The Borg maintained several long-range sensor nodes that might detect them if they lost the cloak. If Sisko went ahead, he could most likely erase Dax's program (which was, for stealth reasons, stored in the computer's temporary memory partition) and shut down the cloaking device for up to a minute. In doing that, he would compromise everything that the replicants had worked for.

O'Brien had sighed at the question. _"Sir, hard resets are only used in drastic situations. I mean…we could purge each partition of data added within the last two hours. That might solve the problem."_

"I think our saboteur will be prepared for such an obvious solution."

_"We'll also lose everything but life support for anywhere between a few seconds and a minute before the computer kicks back into gear. That means main power, shields, weapons, cloak…"_

"This counts as a drastic situation, Mr. O'Brien. How many times have you heard of a starship that took control of itself?"

The engineer thought for a moment, then said, _"Well, sir, the _Enterprise_ did that once or twice. But it wasn't this kind of sabotage." _He sighed the sigh of a man who had been prepared for an easy afternoon, then had a pile of work land right in his lap. _"Can we put it off until we're in a safer position, sir?"_

"Who knows where the _Defiant_ will take us? I want control of my ship back, and I want it back now."

_"Very well. I'm heading down to the core now. Give me a few seconds."_

The Kira-replicant looked down at her console and saw a blinking orange light. That meant that the Dax-replicant was experiencing difficulty with some part of the operation. 

_"Alright, sir,"_ O'Brien drawled. _"I'm in position. Counting down from ten…"_

The Kira-replicant tensed.

_"Nine…"_

At the helm, Dax locked all the temporary information they had gathered and downloaded it to isolinear backup. After the reset, she would restore it and the helm/ops station would continue just as it was. Other officers did the same.

_"Six…"_

Sisko showed no signs of backing down. 

_"Four…"_

Colonel Kira Nerys, seated at Tactical, seemed to stiffen. It was as though some inner voice had told her to look over at her alternate universe counterpart. Their eyes met, and the Kira-replicant was forced to look away. She couldn't allow their plans to be foiled now. Not after all the information-gathering, all the worrying. They had been handed an opportunity that was certainly sent from the Celestial Temple, and she wasn't going to give it up.

_"Three…"_

Captain Sisko suddenly felt something cold press against his naked scalp. He turned to see the replicant of Colonel Kira holding a Bajoran hand phaser, the muzzle firmly pointed at him. She had a kind of strange compassion in her eyes, but behind it was a knife of cold determination. "Pause countdown!" he cried, his gaze never leaving hers. O'Brien heard and stopped just before he said 'two'. Silence reigned on the bridge, until Sisko finally had the courage to ask her one question.

"Why?"

She knew the answer to that one. "Because you can save us."


	20. Chapter 19

T'Svara looked down the arched docking pylon to the three circular rings of _Deep Space Nine_. It was certainly an imposing-looking structure, and she could attribute that to the Cardassian architecture and their predilection for curves and sharp edges. The space station was almost serpentine in its look, organic, sinister, and yet it maintained a curious beauty. Elliptical portholes glittered like strings of bright pearls wound around the cold metal of the habitat ring and the central core. She frowned. Now she could begin to understand Captain Sisko's strange attachment to this place. She maintained something of an irrational connection to her own ship, the _Sarekar_, but that was a Starfleet vessel that upheld the principles she had sworn to upon graduating from the Academy. 

It had been three hours, and the _Defiant_ had not yet returned.

_That_ was irrational.

She turned and spoke into the silence of Pylon One's control gondola. "Computer, confirm the location of the starship _Defiant_."

_"Unable to comply. The _Defiant_ is currently out of sensor range."_

No surprises there. Sisko was supposed to have returned after one hour. For him to be overdue like this was highly irregular. That, and the sole survivor of the alternate DS-Nine had escaped into the corridors and maintenance tunnels of the _Sarekar_, whereabouts unknown. The woman (Connie Laraque, as she recalled) was smart enough to cover her tracks. T'Svara guessed that this kind of guile was a product of fighting the Borg from day one. She could not blame the poor girl, but she was probably consumed with paranoia and confusion. She had to be isolated and brought in. The station was a huge place compared to the smaller _Sarekar_. If Laraque managed to slip through the airlock unnoticed…_no_. T'Svara forced herself to be calm. She had ordered two guards to be present at every exit point, and had requested that the computer inform her whenever Laraque was identified with internal sensors. The only other thing she could think of was the environmental umbilical connections to DS-Nine, but they would be almost impossible to access, and even if she did to the connection ports, they were too small to climb into. Then again, Laraque was probably not living an opulent lifestyle in her reality. And she was most likely desperate and prepared to take measures to escape. T'Svara walked briskly to one of the Cardassian-designed control panels and brought up information on the docking protocols. Each airlock had four transfer conduits that ferried atmospheric gases to and from the docked vessel. They would be too small for a human to crawl through, and with that knowledge, T'Svara relaxed somewhat. But there were still ways to escape.

_"Captain T'Svara."_

The pleasant feminine voice of the _Sarekar's_ computer spoke out of her comm badge, accompanied by a polite chirping noise. The Vulcan pressed the badge once and replied, "Go ahead."

_"Ensign Laraque has been located on deck nine, section four, currently heading towards airlock zero-two."_

Airlock zero-two was the hatch connecting DS-Nine and the starship. It was guarded, so Laraque would not escape that easily, but T'Svara had no doubt that the girl could somehow slip by. After all, she had walked straight out of the sickbay while the doctor was still there. "Deny her access to the airlock hatch," she ordered in precise, clipped tones. "If possible, lock onto her signal and beam her straight to a holding cell."

_"Unable to comply. Transporter lock integrity is insufficient for safe transport."_

"Then isolate her with antipersonnel force-fields and do a blanket transport into the brig, assuming it is safe."

_"Attempting containment procedures."_

T'Svara waited patiently, trying to suppress the feelings of anxiety. It was vital that they talk to her, try to reason with her, get her to tell them what it was like. If the Federation was really as interested as they were trying not to be, then it would give them a big advantage if they knew what the Borg on that side of the transdimensional passage were like. T'Svara admitted that, as a race, the Borg had achieved medical and technological marvels, but at the same time was secretly afraid of them. She had battled them only a little while ago. They were relentless and unemotional, but most importantly, they were apathetic. They had precious few weak points to be exploited. It would be only a matter of time before they would have to overhaul all weapons technology, and repeat the same process again and again to try and stay one step ahead of…

_"Containment procedures successful. Ensign Laraque has been transported to the brig."_

The Vulcan let out a small sigh in the privacy of the control gondola. "Then lock onto my comm badge and beam me directly to the brig. I want to speak with her in person. T'Svara out." She closed the channel and waited for one-point-eight-eight seconds, upon which time the tingling feeling of the transporter took hold and Pylon One dematerialised around her. The pristine, well-lit replaced the darker walls of DS-Nine. She could see a figure standing in one of the cells. "Ensign Laraque."

Connie Laraque was a young woman, only about twenty-five, and would have been considered to be classically beautiful by her human culture. She was moderately short, but slim, her uniform hugging her waist to accentuate this. Deep burgundy hair cascaded to her shoulders; T'Svara did not recognise the rich, earthy red colour as being natural to humans, but surgical alterations could make anything possible in these modern times. Her eyes were the colour of warm, tropical sea water, but their depths were anything but warm. Connie Laraque was frightened and trapped. And she could not escape from her holding cell. The displacement from her own reality may be more unsettling than anyone had anticipated. Perhaps they should have spoken to her first. She stood silently behind the invisible barrier of the force-field.

"Ensign Laraque, you are indeed a worthy adversary. I shall have to consult my tactical officer and improve our security network. Admittedly, the _Sarekar_ has never had to deal with escaping refugees, but we shall endeavour to redesign our containment protocols to address such issues in the future."

Laraque watched her, silently. Then she paced. Her fingers occasionally hovered just above the vertical plane of the force-field, as though probing it for some invisible weakness, feeling for holes in a completely solid wall. T'Svara pursued regardless. "Ensign, I am sure you are experiencing feelings of guilt, sadness, and confusion. I am only partially acquainted with these emotions, but I am aware that they are keenly unpleasant. We can help you. But you must tell us about the situation of DS-Nine before we beamed you out."

"No-one else made it, did they?"

T'Svara had realised that she was going to have to break the news to her. She regarded the elfin woman for a long moment, then inclined her head, once, jerkily. "I apologise, but our scans registered no other unassimilated life forms. There is another starship that may have rescued your colleagues, but they are currently overdue to return."

Connie sighed. "Perhaps they closed the wormhole in time."

Humans did have a custom of using falsehoods as pleasantries, especially during times of mourning or grief; T'Svara decided to make use of that custom. "There was no evidence that the wormhole was either open or closed when we were inside your reality."

"My reality?" The turquoise eyes flicked to meet the Vulcan's in one sharp movement. "So I _was_ right! That wormhole out there is some kind of passage between different realities, isn't it? I mean, one minute DS-Nine is crawling with Borg, and then I'm whisked into the cleanest ship in the fleet and taken into another universe. Yes, it makes _sense!_ It all makes perfect sense!" All the tension seemed to flow right out of her body, and she resumed pacing, this time with more energy and purpose. "Okay, so I'm in a universe where there are no Borg, right?"

"There are Borg," T'Svara said simply, "but they have not appeared within three years. All indications have led us to believe that they are within the boundaries of the Delta Quadrant. Forgive me, ensign, but you do not seem overly concerned by your status as solitary survivor of _Deep Space Nine_. Perhaps you require counselling."

Laraque shrugged. "I've lost too many friends in the war to get all blubbery when Death rears its ugly head. And as for counselling, I think _everyone _in my reality needs it. But it can wait. I can help! I'm an engineer, I can — I need to get out of this cell. Now that I'm safe, I'm not going to harm anyone unless they've got an eyepiece and a prosthetic arm." She stopped pacing again. "Please, captain, I need to be able to do something. The Borg took DS-Nine away from me. Without a home, what else am I supposed to do?

T'Svara found it difficult to argue with the other woman's logic. She appeared to be physically fit, and she seemed to be in full possession of her mental faculties. And she had evaded capture from both the Borg and Starfleet. Ensign Connie Laraque was good. Good enough to thwart two of the most technologically-advanced conglomerates in the known galaxy. She had knowledge about this other reality that no-one else had. The Vulcan captain made an executive decision and walked to the brig's one and only control panel, disabling the force-field barrier that prevented Laraque from leaving her cell. It flickered out with a brief haze of white light. "Thank-you, captain," the other said. She stepped through the elliptical doorway and brushed her hair back. "I assume that we've docked at DS-Nine?"

"That is correct, ensign. But watch your assumptions."

"Yes, ma'am," Laraque said, bowing her head slightly, suitable chastised.

"I believe that there are guest quarters on deck eight. I will accompany you there. The ordeal over the last few hours must have been a physical and mental strain: it is only logical that you recuperate for twelve to twenty-four hours before consulting the station authorities. If you require anything, the _Sarekar's_ staff will be able to help with any foreseeable issues." She turned and marched towards the door. Laraque followed suit.

*                      *                      *


	21. Chapter 20

"And you believe she can help us?"

The shapeshifter known as Odo regarded the Vulcan captain of the _Sarekar_ across the table of _Deep Space Nine's_ ward room and watched her nod. They were, of course, discussing Ensign Laraque. With a possible Borg invasion being whispered over in the halls of the station, Odo was finding as many sources of help as he could. "She is an engineer. Young and inexperienced, but she displays high levels of intuition," the woman across from him remarked. "She escaped from sickbay and from the Borg. It is likely that she is intimately familiar with technology from her reality. At the very least, Ensign Laraque could assist with preparing the station for combat duty."

Odo nodded. He would never admit it, but he was becoming quite worried about the _Defiant_ and it's absence. Every second they wasted was one more second towards the critical flow point of the dimensional conduit (whatever _that_ was), and one more second towards a Borg cube popping through to devastate the station. It happened once in the alternate reality, and Odo had no intentions of giving the Collective a foothold in their own universe. He knew that Laraque was currently resting, so he did not press the point any further. Instead, he activated the wall display and watched sensor data flow across it, sensor data collected by the _Sarekar_ during their brief time in this parallel universe. It appeared relatively ordinary at first. Then he saw readings for Jeraddo, and Bajor, and DS-Nine. They were all eerily similar in some fundamental way, but entirely different. Jeraddo was a class-M moon. Bajor was crawling with Borg. DS-Nine, a Borg stronghold. He shook his head slowly. "The _Defiant_ is still overdue," he said, more to himself than to his associate, "by more than three hours now. While it is possible that they have been destroyed or assimilated, I'm not willing to accept that just yet. Odo to Ops: prepare a runabout for immediate departure, search-and-retrieve mission configuration." He paused. "Choose the best staff for the job. But…they will possibly have to face the Borg, and that means self-destruction rather than assimilation if they're cornered. Make sure they know that."

_"Acknowledged, constable,"_ the voice of some officer replied. _"The _Mekong_ will be ready to launch in four minutes. I'm informing Lieutenants Havaar and Murphy to report to runabout pad one. I'll brief them accordingly."_

"Thank-you. Odo out."

He folded his arms again, a peculiarly-human gesture that he had never quite understood for himself. "I can arrange accommodation for Ensign Laraque right away."

"I do not believe that will be necessary," T'Svara replied crisply. "She is currently sleeping in guest quarters aboard my ship. And…" she hesitated, then plowed ahead, "she is adapting to the concept of an assimilated DS-Nine in her own universe. Giving her quarters here may provoke undesirable psychological reactions."

"Of course. You'll keep me posted?"

"Yes. Likewise?"

"If anything turns up, I'll let you know."

The Vulcan got out of her chair in one smooth motion and marched out of the ward room. Odo watched her leave, then keyed the controls on the central table and watched as the wall screen became dark and switched itself off. He had to think of a plan. DS-Nine was under threat, and their captain and his warship were missing in action. On top of that, there was also a Starfleet woman from another reality who lost her home. The only way out he could see was to find a way to collapse the conduit as soon as the _Defiant_ returned. 


	22. Chapter 21

The _Defiant_ cantered through space like a rudderless ocean-going ship on the high seas. Star lines on the viewscreen streaked by at odd angles, but Captain Ben Sisko was not overly concerned with the visual effects caused by the jerry-rigged cloaking device at warp speed. He stared past the phaser that was pointed at his head and into the eyes of a Bajoran woman who returned his gaze with a measure of desperation. A bead of sweat rolled down his scalp, brushing by the cold metal muzzle of the hand weapon and dripping onto the sleeve of his uniform. "What do you mean, I can save you?" he asked. His voice quavered a little with the knowledge that the Kira-replicant was quite determined to accomplish her mission. If killing him slotted into that category, so be it.

The Kira-replicant's eyes bored into his own, and it was one of the few times in his life when he felt truly uncomfortable. "We need you, Captain Sisko. The war is lost without you." She sighed, and her eyelids fluttered once. Was she uncertain about what she was doing? If Sisko had to overpower her for whatever reason, he needed to exploit that moment of distraction. "I don't know the whole story. They'll explain when we get there."

"Who are 'they'?" Sisko enquired, trying desperately to regain control of the situation. "And where are we going?"

"I don't know, exactly. Dax got the information and told me bits and pieces, but as far as I'm concerned, that's classified. We'll hit a dark-matter nebula in about fifteen minutes, at this speed." She paused, and the hand phaser shifted a little in her grasp. Sisko swallowed nervously. "Come to think of it, I'm not sure who 'they' are. We were given orders separately. You know, in case of a successful Borg boarding party or something."

At the flight controls, Jadzia Dax regarded the Kira-replicant. She had spun around when Sisko halted the countdown, and by her facial expression, the captain could tell that she had just experienced some form of epiphany. "It was all a ruse, wasn't it? Your arrival wasn't an accident. You're obviously not helpless refugees. Even the damaged runabout — "

"No!" the Kira-replicant barked, her head twisting sharply to face Dax. "The runabout was real. We were attacked as we fled DS-Nine. I lost three crew members in that attack, so don't you _dare_ suggest that it wasn't real." The flash of anger returned to a simmer, then gradually faded. "But you are right, in part. Our arrival wasn't an accident. I don't know how we crossed over. Very perceptive, lieutenant."

"Colonel," Sisko tried. "The cloaking device, the computer lockouts, the helm…that was all your doing, yes?"

She hesitated. "Yes. And the others from my dimension."

"Will they be permanent?"

"No."

"Then…then how about you put the phaser away, and we can discuss this with the others?" He cracked a shaky smile for her benefit. "I would certainly feel a lot better about the situation."

The Kira-replicant paused and considered the offer. Then, with obvious effort, she stepped back from Sisko and let her arm fall to her side. Sisko let out a loud sigh and let his muscly frame relax as the tension of the last five minutes flowed away. He was, for the most part, as safe as one could be on a ship that was hurtling into an alternate universe crowded with Borg and ragtag Federation freedom fighters. _Hmmm…_ he turned the ironic statement over in his mind for a split second before leaning over and cancelling the computer's search for cracking programs. Now he knew who the culprit was, it was a pointless effort anyway. The best thing to do was let the _Defiant_ ferry them to their eventual destination, wherever that was going to be. "Thank-you," he said, wiping his forehead with one sleeve. "Call your companions, and we'll have a little conference."

It only took the Kira-replicant a few moments to page the other replicants with her comm badge. They emerged from one of the two hatch on the lateral bulkheads of the bridge. Worf looked suspicious and a little disgruntled, while Dax looked positively apologetic as she walked in through the hatch. "I'm so sorry, Benjamin," she got out, then she walked straight past and stood at the Kira-replicant's side. The three of them made for a resourceful trio. Sisko had to give them that. He nodded at Dax, then stumbled a little as the inertial dampeners failed to compensate for some kind of movement. One hand involuntarily gripped the side of his chair until the systems caught up and everything returned to normal. He shot a quizzical look at the Kira-replicant. "We've changed course," she explained. "That means we only have another forty minutes to go."

Sisko absorbed this new piece of information and fell back into his chair. The three replicants were straight in his line of sight. "Alright. This has gone far enough." He felt a glower work its way onto his face. "You don't know where we're headed, correct?" A second passed before the Dax-replicant shook her head. "You haven't got any idea of Borg movement in this sector?" Sisko asked.

"We've got some preliminary scans," she offered. "A few patrol routes…"

"But you can't guarantee the safety of my crew?"

"Not exactly…"

"Then I want you to turn us around and get us home."

The Dax-replicant looked to her companions for support, then, finding none, addressed Sisko directly. "It isn't that easy, Benjamin. The cracking program is almost entirely self-contained. I can't just call it up on the terminal and tell it to turn the _Defiant_ around. I hate to tell you this, but we're stuck with a one-way ticket to wherever we're going." She paused, looking for some hint of forgiveness in the captain's face, but gave up when he sat unmoving. "Admiral Kev'ral designed it – he's a Klingon, so it's probably a brute-force program – and it was made to stand up to Borg countermeasures. I doubt the _Defiant_ has anything that can stop it. No offence," she hastily amended when she saw a few indignant looks. "When we reach our destination, the program is designed to wipe itself out."

"By then," Sisko said pointedly, "it might be too late."

"The program is doing everything it can to keep you safe!" the Dax-replicant said, exasperated. Her eyes darted to a nearby console, and the glowing chronometer set into one corner. "We only have another half-hour or so before we get there. We need to focus on getting ready."

"Getting ready for _what_, exactly?" Sisko growled.

"I don't know!" she cried, the frustration and helplessness finally bursting through. "_None_ of us know. We're just trying to find a way to save our lives, and yours. You'll understand when we get there…" she faltered momentarily, then seemed to brush it off and continue. "Just give us a _chance_, captain! That's all we want. I know it's a big risk, and if it goes down, then I'll take responsibility. But if it works…if it works, the free races of this galaxy might actually live to see another year. That's what's at stake here. The Borg have new weapons and equipment that we've only dreamed about before. It's up to us to stop them, and to do that, we're going to need your help. You're in with this now, like it or not."

Sisko watched her impassively for a moment, like a sculpture, eyes fixed on hers. Then he relented and allowed a quick nod to break the illusion of complete passiveness. It was as if he had only just realised the stakes in this game. He had come to accept the helplessness of their situation, but he was committed now. The replicants did have a legitimate case, in his eyes, at least. But something niggled in the back of his mind. Something wasn't quite right about helping an alternate universe with their problems. He would never choose to leave them helpless; that contradicted everything he felt towards survivors such as the Alliance. However, the implications of such an action, the consequences of fighting the Borg with this ragtag band, were astronomical. 

"With only twenty-five minutes until our destination, I can't really tell you a lot," the Kira-replicant said, now composed. "We're being kept in the dark to avoid disclosure. You know what I mean, right?"

Benjamin steepled his fingers against his forehead and contemplated the replicants before him with as much impartiality as he could muster. "If you're assimilated," he realised, "you would be exposing vital information, so they tell you as little as possible."

"Something like that."

"I still don't understand how one ship, one man, will make the difference in this war."

"What do you mean?"

"To be blunt, Colonel, I don't appreciate the way you took over my ship to make a point," Sisko growled softly. "I will help you because it is a moral obligation, as well as my duty as a Starfleet officer. Now, I know about disclosure, but I want you to be as honest as possible with me. What are the chances that we're about to fly headlong into a battle?"

Worf, of the mirror universe, frowned in concentration. He seemed to be less of an expert in tactics than the Bajoran beside him, but was worth his considerable weight in gold when it came to brute force. "It is unlikely," he rumbled. "The Alliance will most likely send us to a facility where we can be debriefed. The _Defiant_ will be assessed and our cracking programs removed before it will see any combat."

"Assessed?"

"We will not send a damaged ship into the fray, sir. And…you may have some technologies that will prove useful in the future. Technicians will take schematics, but there will be no disassembly of the ship or its systems."

Sisko absorbed this information. Some of the tension seemed to disappear with the knowledge that the _Defiant_ would probably still exist by the next chime of the chronometer. He stood up and began to pace the length of the forward bulkhead of the bridge. Starlines whipped by on the large viewscreen, each one bringing them closer to their hidden destiny. The captain contemplated the blackness. Would this prove to be their last venture into the void? Was this the final chapter in the adventures of the _Defiant_ and her stalwart crew? He couldn't answer those questions. Not yet. For now, he had to concentrate on finding out what the hell was going on. And to do _that_, they had to come out of warp and consult with these Alliance characters. 

"Alright. Make yourselves useful," he blurted. "If we don't emerge near a friendly installation, though, I'll be turning us right around."


	23. Chapter 22

The _Defiant_ slipped back into realspace right on schedule. 

A lonely, isolated star system was the setting for the Alliance's rendezvous with the wayward Starfleet ship. It was comprised of seven planets, and the tightly-muscled vessel had emerged in the shadow of the sixth far-flung planet, a tiny ball of rock and ice where the burning star appeared as a flare of light in the far distance. They were not overly far from DS-Nine. If they pursued a direct course, they could return to the passageway within an hour or so. But to Captain Sisko, it felt like so much more. He watched the main viewscreen with a dour expression as the starlines snapped back into delicate pinpoint rhinestones against the black velvet cloth of space. "Helm controls unlocking," Lieutenant Dax reported. "We have control again. The cloaking device is still operating under its altered state, but at reduced levels. All stations report nominal."

Beyond the transparent membrane of the forward screen and the layers of hull material and embedded machinery, the emptiness of space loomed. Sisko stared at it with a razor gaze, but it silently chose to keep its secrets to itself. 

"Captain," the Kira-replicant said calmly, "we're going to have to decloak and broadcast a signal to let them know we're here."

"Do it."

Like a sleeping dragon, the rumble of the EPS conduits came up a notch. The bridge felt a little bigger when the lights returned to standard brightness. A series of rapid-fire chirps from the Tactical II console filled the air, a stilted machinated parody of a bird's song, and the Kira-replicant transmitted a long string of what sounded like computer code. In his mind, Sisko could imagine the bursts of energy hurtling across the gap between them and the planet, bright blue sparks that existed for the briefest of moments before vanishing into subspace and ceasing to exist within the usual laws of physics. Somewhere on the planet surface, a receiving device would capture every single one of those tiny sparks and translate it into a code that would serve to identify them as a non-threatening ship. 

Another, more insistent noise emanated from the screens that the Kira-replicant attended to. "We've got a hit," she reported with a hint of relief. "The outpost is responding. They're undetected and ready to welcome us in." 

"Planet-side?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then what about the _Defiant_?"

The Bajoran checked a string of text on the monitors in front of her. "For assessment, we'll be docking at a base hidden…hidden further in-system. All senior officers are to transfer down to the sixth planet for debriefing and orders. Worf, Dax, and I will pilot us to the space station while you and your crew disembark."

Sisko clearly didn't like the idea, but nodded tersely. "Dax, you're with me. Computer, page Lieutenant Worf, and Doctor Bashir – they are to meet me in transporter room one immediately. You three…" he swept one arm around the bridge to include the replicants. "You are now in temporary command. I trust you far enough to let you take the ship into dock, but I want to meet you on the planet as soon as you're done. I want to get to the bottom of this." He stood from the chair and smoothed the wrinkles out of his uniform. It was clean and mostly-neat, but he felt like a hot shower and some time with nothing to think about. Time without the replicants, who seemed to alternate between desperate and independent, trusting and mistrustful, honest and deceitful. He was angry that they had used his ship as the catalyst for their plan, but at the same time, could not fault them for it. They were in an alternate universe with few resources and an infinitely-diabolical opponent. In their situation, Ben Sisko would have done the same thing. Although…there was no sense in placing a fully-armed starship in their hands. He made sure that Miles O'Brien was in charge and would intervene if the replicants attempted to take the _Defiant_ off-course. 

It was time to find out the truth.


End file.
